Chat rules:

Don’t clutter or spam.

Don’t use the party chat for silent communication with others nearby, you can make a new chatroom with people in your direct vicinity.

No begging or pushing for handouts.

The party chat filled up a lot in the few hours that our party lost to the rescue mission and the transformation. People had been spamming the chat with a lot of stuff. A LOT of stuff.

As a result, Mr. Geruet tried to enforce the rules above, but some people were brazenly ignoring it and tension ran high when he began to threaten to kick people from the party if they continued.

I hadn’t really gone through all of it, so I didn’t know how bad it got. Thomas sifted though it with a much faster and more efficient pace than anyone else could manage, and told us if there was anything worth mentioning.

Which made me a little envious. Despite the massive change of his new body, Thomas had taken to it a lot faster than the rest of us, probably thanks to the massive change negating his old muscle memories and his high intelligence simply making him think faster. Even Elise, who spent all her training time learning how to use her new means of flight, was still a bit wobbly in the air. But Thomas could read the chat, talk and walk at the same time and was even practising his freaky new finger movements at times. I could walk just fine, but still needed to focus on the road.

The first thing that filled the chat had been the class and race choices, often including theories and plans of how they would work. And some people engaged in the discussion to talk about team synergy and optimisation, which quickly led to way too much clutter.

Then there had been the descriptions of one’s surroundings and questions of where the others were. A lot of people wanted to quickly regroup and reorganise, so the same questions had been asked over and over again and some people had started spamming questions addressed to specific crawlers until they answered. There were apparently means of long distance transportation available, but on a floor the size of Spain we weren’t going to get across that fast.

But the thing that got Mr. Geruet all uppity had been the trade and begging. There were a bunch of items that people could no longer equip with their new race, and those were being traded or donated. Which quickly resulted in barter and a few people begging to be given certain items.

One person had been particularly persistent, and was accused by several people of spamming them for handouts in PMs. He was banned, but then the arguments began on whether Mr. Geruet was really their leader entitled to just make such decisions for everyone else.

Fortunately, I just got the abridged version of it from Thomas so I was spared having to read through the circular arguing.

According to Thomas, our group had been split up into six starting positions. Our Volos group, the Frenchmen were once again a lone pair, Gamma had their own guide, and the main camp’s bulk was spread amongst three guides. Zartas had the most of them, and he hadn’t been the best help picking out races and classes.

As a result, Corey’s group was now the big enchilada of the Zartas group with some poor builds and class choices while other strong crawlers were once again being vague about whether they’d try to meet up with the rest.

Amongst the noteworthy new race and class choices were a few interesting picks, at least in terms of people that were useful even from far away. Two people had gotten themselves a crafter build, and one a long-ranged healer.

The healer was called Trevor, now of the Basement-Dwelling Virgin human race with the House Security Coward class. The man had willingly transformed himself into an obese greasy shut-in NEET, and immediately retreated to a Safe Zone which he probably wouldn’t be leaving until it was time to descend to the next floor. But he was still very useful, as his race and class combo allowed him to scry upon party members and heal them from any distance.

He was a lot more popular and sought after than most people in the chat, but told everyone that he’d be helping everyone equally as long as they made sure to properly plan their raids and boss battles in advance rather than asking for his immediate help on a moment’s notice. And help him get to the next floor when the time came.

The first crafter, and for the time being the more interesting of the two, was Danny the Skin Grafter. I wasn’t sure if that was his race or class, but it meant that he could make all kinds of armour out of corpse hides. We donated some of the Krutnik corpses to him to make armour out of, and he said he’d give us priority for giving him quite a lot of it.

The second crafter would likely grow more popular in time, because Selma was a Hell’s Bakery Battle Baker. Danny was still more popular right now thanks to everyone still needing any armour at all for some parts of their body, but in time her consumables would be the more sought after commodity. She could cook food into useful pastries and other consumables, apparently conjuring flour and milk and such out of thin air as she made her recipes from the listed required ingredients only. Right now she was power-levelling her way through plenty of poor rat steaks to practise the cooking mechanics of the dungeon and get some easy levels.

I thought it was a great idea that some people chose to utilise our large party and set out to be craftsmen this way. Similar to Ben’s pickpocket build being superior to a DPS rogue stealing on the side, specialized crafters would no doubt be superior to anyone else. And others could then pick up more niche crafting options, with everyone benefitting from exchanging ingredients for items. Everyone blindly stumbled upon mobs that were treasure troves of certain ingredients all the time, but most of us couldn’t use it while some people would have to scour the dungeon for the stuff they actually needed. Really, just three people picking such a build was actually lower than I expected.

I wonder what kind of craft I should pick up, once we got to the fourth floor and could start buying and deploying crafting tables. Well, that was a question for later.

Right now we were more focussed on our surroundings. The NPCs were ignoring us, the mostly orcish villagers completely disregarding the group of odd ducks amongst them as they went about their business. The village seemed to have nearing a hundred working adults and two or three times that number when including the children and elderly, most of whom were averaging around lvl5-10. The children that played around us were usually lvl1-2, and most of the adults either had the ‘Commoner’ or ‘Farmer’ class.

Then there were the village guards, human-sized suits of armour that just stood there unmoving and ever-watching. They were lvl75, which immediately put Ben in a sour mood over all these ‘railroading overlevelled NPCs’ that were taking away our player agency.

Volos already told us that these guards would be attacking if we broke the law, and that they were slow but powerful and very numerous. You could run away from them easily enough, but they were almost impossible to kill at our level and went straight to execution protocols over the slightest issue. Some people in the chat tested out some stuff, and shared their findings with the rest of us. Using stealth skills in front of them was fine, but they could suddenly jump into action for even innocent behaviour like shooting a spell in the air or having your blade drawn for too long.

Apparently they didn’t react aggressively to someone putting a bucket over their head at first, but Borant already patched that bug before my party entered the third floor. Alania, the person that tried this before it got patched, told us that the guards still didn’t remove the bucket itself, meaning that they remained blinded and partially deafened while they attacked you.

She seemed intent to somehow take down one of these guards before the end of the floor, but few people reacted to her enthusiastic invitations and promises of good achievements and loot.

There seemed to be just ten guards in this village, one inn, one shop and the mayor’s manor. The rest was simple-looking cottages, spread out loosely yet bunched up here and there to create dark alleyways. We checked out the shop, but it was indeed ridiculously overpriced and the shop owner offered us abysmal prices for our goods. As we had no limit to how much we could ‘carry’, we didn’t sell him anything.

“So, what’s our plan?” Elise eventually asked. “There’s not much to do in this place, and I’m not seeing any of these quests. Given the size of this place, they’ll probably just be bronze quest boxes anyway and we already know those are worthless.”

Well, they weren’t worthless. They were just straightforward and easily completed quests that gave little reward, and the chat already reached a consensus that they were only worth it when they were fast or could be done on the side. Where Neighbourhood Bosses were a worthy but fairly easy grind challenge while Borough Bosses were a huge jump in difficulty, bronze quests seemed to be the bottom of the barrel while silver quests were the first quests worth spending time on.

We had a quest tab that already filled itself to the brim with quests, courtesy of every quest accepted by anyone of our large party being shown to us no matter how far away it was. Apparently you didn’t even get a choice to accept it, it just added itself automatically.

Completing a quest would only result in a loot box for the ones who actually completed the quest, so I hadn’t been receiving a backlog of bronze loot boxes just for being in the same party. Gather quests gave one box to the one who handed over the goods, and couldn’t be split. Escort missions came with a limit of crawlers, meaning that only the most popular crawlers would get the reward if you came with too many. Kill quests seemed to be the most forgiving, rewarding everyone who participated within reason.

From the quest descriptions, bronze quests followed much of the most generic kind of MMO filler-quest descriptions. Kill 5 of this, gather 10 of that, etc. The chat agreed not to take bronze escort missions, those took too long. Accept kill missions, you’re under no obligation to finish them but you could come across the mobs by happenstance. Most of those quests were tied to a region to prevent us from completing a quest for someone on the other side of the map, but people were randomly stumbling across the herbs needed for gather quests all the time.

The silver and gold quest boxes had a lot more narrative and detail than the bronze ones. Amongst the two dozen of us crawlers only three silver quests had been found, but they all spoke of some kind of mystery or self-contained story to resolve.

“I don’t think there will be a good quest around here, but we should check the inn first.” Thomas said. “They say that’s where we’ll find most quests.”

Elise shrugged and led the way there, occasionally floating up to look over the rooftops. The village wasn’t big or winding, but it was still confusing at times as we didn’t want to risk jumping over fences and trudging through people’s front yards to get to our destination in a straight line. For all we knew, that triggered the guards. Even though the houses here were small and far apart, the gardens and winding dirt roads made for many turns that quickly confused my sense of direction. Especially in this new body that couldn’t fully walk on auto-pilot yet, forcing me to focus on the path ahead and balancing myself.

But that should slowly get easier with time. Aside from practice, I already levelled up various passive skills to move my new body naturally. And the clunky robotic way of moving my limbs was kind of thematically appropriate, I supposed.

The inn was easy to spot, as it was the only human building in a village of authentic-looking cottages. The place looked Mexican, a bar with a few cheap and low effort tourist trap siesta decorations, the storefront deprived of any glass. There was no modern tech inside, even the electricity sockets had been reduced to holes in the wall half-obscured by whatever furniture was at hand. There were two vending machines behind the counter, but they had no electricity and were used as shelves by the barman to stock cheap-looking swill.

The place had bedrooms and allowed us to open our lootboxes if we had any, but it wasn’t a Safe Zone. The barman was a lvl12 Orc Bartender instead of a high-level Bopca, and didn’t have the non-combat NPC notification. That had certain implications, though we weren’t going to get into a bar fight until after nightfall. Unlike the shopkeeper, the prices for bedrooms and simple goods in this place didn’t seem to be overcharging us.

We sat down at one of the empty tables, and the barman took our orders. He immediately broke the immersion of a small village bumpkin by recommending me a high-mineral water drink that my body could filter for cobalt and some kind of bug dew for Thomas, instead of being ignorant of our species and dietary needs. He didn’t even seem to realise the outlandishness of what he was offering, and the prices were the same as Elise’s and Ben’s swill.

We didn’t actually drink the stuff, but sat around holding them. The chat claimed that NPCs have a habit of bothering you with their quests when you sat down to eat, while being less eager to approach standing crawlers.

I took a sip of my brew, and Ben jerked back in fright. Thomas looked intrigued and Elise was looking elsewhere when I did it, but her eyes widened when she looked over and saw me.

“Holy fuck, Darryl! What the hell?!” She exclaimed.

“Right, I guess this looks kind of freaky.” I said, a bit embarrassed.

“Kind of? You’re a freaking eldritch abomination!” Ben said, his initial reaction replaced by curiosity and excitement. He leaned in and studied my tongue.

I already knew that my face would go wide open like double doors to reveal the inside of my mouth so that my tongue could reach out. What the android body hadn’t made clear, was that I had rows of metallic teeth growing from the insides of my cheeks running all the way down into my throat. My tongue came out from the depths of my stomach, and simply submerged in the drink. If I still had nipples, I could now lick them without having to crane my neck. Not only was it apparently able to filter cobalt from the water without me having to swallow any, my tongue was barbed and ribbed to look more like a very deadly tentacle than a tongue.

“Not going to lie, that looks really creepy.” Elise said.

“I know, right!? So weird!” Ben said excitedly. “It’s making his drink bubble!”

“Excuse me?” Someone said. I looked at the orc that approached us, and he didn’t give my extended tongue a second glance. The text above his head said that his name was Tolley. “You’re adventurers, right? You solve problems?”

We were silent, and looked at Elise. She tried to play dumb, but then sighed. Whether she liked it or not, she was still the one with the most charisma for the time being.

“What do you want, and how much are you paying?” Elise asked.

“I- I cannot spare much, I’m afraid.” Tolley said. “But I hope you find it in your heart to help us. Our farmstead is being threatened by burrowing monsters too dangerous for me to fight by myself, and if they destroy our crops we’ll…”

He held back tears but his eyes were shining, and he seemed torn between his pride against begging for help and his desperation.

“How much?” Elise repeated.

“I can spare some coin for each kill, but…” Tolley said. “But aren’t you guys supposed to do these things for the sake of adventure? Or the goodness of your hearts? Heroic renown?”

“What the hell are you talking about, don’t try to pressure us into unpaid work with your empty words and ideals!” Elise bit back. “How. Much?”

“Two gold pieces per kill.” Tolley said, reluctantly. “Kill the creatures roaming my farmstead, I cannot afford you guys slaughtering all the other ones too. I just hope that you come to your senses once you see how bad things are getting. Without intervention, this whole village will… Will…”

His eyes, which were suspiciously dry after Elise interrupted his previous emotional moment, wetted up again. It lost a lot of its emotional impact the second time.

Elise sighed. “Where is your farmstead?”

“Just over yonder, not three hours that way.” Tolley said. “I’ll gladly escort you there so that you can’t miss it.”

New quest!

A nameless village, overlooked by the protecting gaze of the governor! A mysterious threat from beneath the earth, bubbling its way to the surface! Lots of cute children, threatened by famine! Something is awry here, and this is but the tip of the iceberg. Can you save the village?

Completing this quest will yield a Silver Quest Box!

Bonus objective: Kill the burrowing creatures on and directly below Tolley’s land (max. 10m below surface) to extort the poor man for 2 gold pieces per kill! You’ll only be taking feeding money directly out of his young daughter’s mouth, and she can use a harsher diet. By the way, dragging burrowers onto his land before killing them also counts! There’s no limit to how much you can put Tolley in debt!

I got a ping from our party chat. Not the bloated party chat that I muted a while back, but the private chat that we made for just the four of us.

Thomas: Silver and nearby, it’s doable.

Darryl: I thought those were rarer?

Thomas: It’s been theorised that the abundance of crawlers plays a role in that. The popular people aren’t being bothered with bronze quests, and gold quests aren’t offered to regulars if there’s a popular crawler nearby.

Thomas: I don’t know if we’re the only crawlers here, but I haven’t seen anyone else. It’s a small village, we might be getting this quest by default of us being the only players around.

Elise: Good point.

Ben: i think that he meant we get loot boxes, when he said we work for free normal

Elise: I know, I got an achievement for forcing him to pay us extra for a quest.

A Silver Asshole Box opened itself in front of Elise, and a small pile of gold disappeared into her inventory.

“Alright, let’s go.” Elise said.

We got up and followed Tolley out of the inn. Before we reached the door though, three more NPCs jumped us with more quest hooks.