I was officially in a world filled with crazy people.

James had let his mate, one he supposedly cared for deeply, carry a weak metal container filled with a liquid that was explosively flammable. The tiniest flame had set it to burning. Jessica seemed irritated by it, but not even close to discorporating from the stress and betrayal. She didn’t even seem that upset, merely irritated that he had not informed her of the potential threat.

Was this normal for them? Almost casual destruction potential? They seemed to be taking the Game of War very seriously, but at the same time treating it like a pastime. The fascinating part was, it was working. They were prepared for the worst in a way I could have never imagined.

Was that what being a human was like? Preparing for the worst but hoping for the best, and being completely ready when the worst was what you uncovered? It was almost irrational, yet strangely compelling.

Max insisted we ‘search the room’. I didn’t understand why, since there were no visible resources, but his insistence was rewarded when Cody uncovered a stone that was slightly lighter colored than the rest of the tiles. They used something called a ‘crowbar’, a long metal lever with wedges at both ends, and one end turned into a curve, for leverage assistance, I supposed.

Underneath the stone, in a small hollow, were a number of large green crystalline rocks. They were cut into all sorts of interesting shapes, but after a few moments, Max asked, “Are those emeralds?”

Selena announced, “raw peridot, Looks like Mexican stone. Great clarity for cutting, if we could find the right cutter, some of those rocks look to be in the 5-7 carat range, potentially worth several thousand.”

Jessica laughed, “Yeah, trust Selena to know gemstones at a glance. If we find a pair of shoes, I might be able to do the same thing.”

Max shrugged while Cody and James chuckled. “At least we know one thing. Treasure is definitely a thing. If we find a golden head on a pedestal, no touching.” He looked at me briefly, and added, “Movie reference.”

Terminator had moved onward while I concentrated on sending him through the tunnel that was in the next area. There had been no traps triggered, but the next area looked like it was open to the light. It was covered in heavier vegetation, much like the vines that had cloaked the original tunnel’s entrance, as well as ferns and the taller vegetation with woody stems called ‘trees’.

The room was about eighty meters, and round, with rocky walls. If the team were to search this room, it would be a true challenge. I had stopped Terminator at the entrance, but he hadn’t spotted any biological drones yet. There were, however, suspicious-looking movements occasionally in the greenery, where a fern would tremble for a moment before going still, so I called attention to them.

“They aren’t attacking Terminator already?” James asked.

I shook my head, “No, but he isn’t fully into the room yet either. They might be trying to… get him deeper in, and surround him or take him by an odd angle, or something.”

“Ambush predators. Like to run through head-high weeds. We’ve already seen undead ranged weapons. Max, what do you think?” James asked.

“One of two things,” Max replied. “But I would rule out a repeat of the undead. She says they are barely twitching leaves, which implies intelligence and stealthiness. So either living or undead pygmies, or velociraptors. Based on the theme we’ve seen so far, I would actually go with dinos because it seems to be trying to look South American with a pop culture twist. I’d bet minibosses, not a horde.”

I looked between the two of them, “Why minibosses?” I tried to get to the gist of the question.

Cody chuckled, “Because of a very popular piece of pop culture. The Dungeon seems to be trying to adapt to local stories, and a very popular one involves dinosaurs, basically fictional oversized lizards, but this is a training dungeon.”

Max nodded, “That’s exactly it. We’ve already held off ranged undead, and a swarm of melee monsters, so it seems that the best training for us low levels would be two or three more powerful monsters. If it were a giant overgrown jungle, I would be thinking Jaguars, but head-high weeds with two or three heavy-duty melees that know how to stay stealthy and attack from ambush screams fictional monsters from a movie called ‘Cretaceous Park’.

I was worried. Not so much about the monsters, they were bound to be hugely dangerous, but about humans indulging in entertainment that featured these things.

“Were there humans in the movie?” I asked.

Max nodded, “Yep, they were getting picked off by the monsters one by one.”

They started talking about tactics to defeat it, and I walked partway into the tunnel, curling up against the stone wall and putting my head in my hands. Were they all soulless? Being entertained by human death at the hands of monsters?

After a few minutes, Jessica walked into the tunnel, from where the group was discussing tactics, and folded back against the wall, gracefully sliding down to slump next to me. She was silent for a few moments, I guess collecting her thoughts and deciding what to say, and then said, “I’m sorry.”

I lowered my hands and looked at her for a moment, “For what?”

“We just went through and killed a bunch of creatures that apparently resembled your people. The whole time we were just thinking about experience and loot, and never took the time to think about how it would affect you. We are gamers. Imagining situations like this and how to deal with them is just what we do.”

I shook my head, “I understand. They were attacking us, and to clear the dungeon we needed to defeat them. I knew I would have to deal with things like that. It’s hard, but...I can learn to accept it. It’s not that at all.”

“Then what is it?” She asked, curiously. “Something is obviously upsetting you.”

“The popular entertainments. You… glorify monsters that kill humans, and are fascinated with them. I don’t know what I have gotten myself into. What other kinds of entertainment… I mean, how horrible does it get? Are most humans soulless? Do they actually enjoy watching horrible things like people getting...picked off one by one?”

Jessica sighed. “I think we may have gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit, diving into a dungeon while you don’t understand a basic facet of being human.”

I nodded, “Obviously.”

She sighed deeply, and shook her head, “One of the most important things about being human involves the basic understanding, on an instinctual level, that at any time, at any moment, your life could be ended. Tragically, brutally, surprisingly, even in the safest place in existence something awful could happen that could snuff you out, just like that.”

“We live our lives around that knowledge. One of the first things we have to learn is to stop worrying about it, or we would curl up in a ball and do nothing, ever. Every part of our being rotates around the fact that we are mortal. And our most important instinct is to fight against it. It’s what allows us to thrive as a species, our individuality and willingness to never give up life without a fight. When you told us that over ten percent of your planet just… rolled over and died due to what, to us, was just an obstacle, it shocked us just as much as our entertainment shocked you.”

“But… your husband, he just casually put flammable liquid that could have killed you if it ignited in your pack. You only gave a token protest and clearly forgave him.”

She looked at me closely. “Fighting to survive is what we do. Everything, from the way we care for our children, to how we react to threats, revolves around our personal survival and the survival of those we are closest to, the ones we care about. We are a world of threats, and everything we do is weighing one threat against another.”

She shrugged, “it’s a constant dance of weighing one threat against another. Was I angry at him for putting the fuel in my backpack? Of course! But it wasn’t for putting it in my backpack, it was for not letting me know about it. If he had told me, I would have put it in there myself, and he knew that perfectly well… which was why he didn’t mention it because having emergency flammable materials for the threats we might face was more likely to help me survive than the threat of it rupturing.”

She chuckled, “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he had half a dozen cans of Sterno and maybe even a grenade or ten himself… those are both potentially more dangerous than the lighter fluid. Because the threats we are facing outweigh the threats of him having them.”

“As far as movies and our games are concerned, we have made a virtue and entertainment out of the idea of creating threats and ways to overcome them. There are exceptions, but even the most horrible monster movies usually have a single human that survived, and overcoming adversity is what we humans do… we LOVE the idea of identifying with that survivor, of coming up with a million ways we could have done a better job under the circumstances.”

She shrugged, “Even the stories where evil wins make us wonder what we would have done differently, how we would have survived where the people in the movie didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, there are some sick people out there that enjoy some very sick things, but that is not humanity, that is just catering to a small group of exceptions.”

She smiled, “You know how you said you were insane?”

I nodded.

“Well, I am willing to bet that every species has insane individuals. Your insanity makes you very sane among humans, so imagine how disturbed you would have to be for us to qualify you as insane!” she chuckled a little, and I smiled weakly.

“I suppose. I don’t understand why you would be shocked at a bunch of completely alien people choosing to take their own lives, though.”

“Because to most stable humans, who have devoted their lives to surviving everything our hell world can threaten us with, death is the enemy. And enemy we all face and will someday lose to. The idea of giving up your most important challenge without even fighting back or trying to triumph is just… abhorrent. There are exceptions, like if someone is dying painfully already, or chooses not to live with feeling useless, but those exceptions are rare.”

She smiled a little, again, “It’s how we secure our eternity, how we face reality. We fight for our children, and whatever little piece of us can live on after we die. You said you were looking for allies to help you stop the Sintar, well, we are those allies… we will fight with everything we have to stop them from conquering us or killing us. If something threatens our own very individual lives and the lives of those we care about, it’s nearly hard-wired to stop them by any means possible… even if that means Genocide.”

She chuckled, “There’s a theory that has been chasing around forever that assumes that aliens could not exist.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because we assume that to any alien species, their own life would be more important to them than our lives. So it would be logical to assume that if they saw us, they would consider us a potential threat.”

I thought about it for a moment, “So you assumed that if there were aliens capable of getting to Earth, they would notice that you were a potential threat, and immediately wipe out your species to preserver their own?”

She nodded.

“That is not… impossible. There are certain species that would see it that way, especially considering how individualistic you are. Did they ever consider that you might have just been too out of the way to even be noticed?”

“I guess?”

I nodded, “You really are. Space is big, really big. My species was the only one that had modern records of your existence. When the progenitors seeded the galaxy, they never bothered to leave anything behind to tell us where all the things they left behind were, probably on purpose. Your star is yellow, which is almost uninhabitable. Your planet is packed with poisons, and insanely high gravity. Even if another race spotted you on instruments, they would probably never have come here looking for life unless they detected your radio waves or something.”

She nodded, “Are you feeling better? Do you think you can fight again?”

I nodded, and she hopped to her feet, offering me her hand. I rolled to my own feet carefully and her eyes widened.

“What is it?”

“I think I know what your grace ability is now. I have something similar, my new wire-fighting, but mine is specialized for combat, yours is for… looking umm…”

I raised an eyebrow at her quizzically.

“For looking as attractive as physically possible in motion. Primarily to the opposite sex, but it also makes you attractive to those who are not interested in having sex with you. If you were to choose a job as a dancer, or a lot of other dance-related movements, you could name your price.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. Was this some kind of curse that the system gave me? A guarantee that I would be forever pestered to breed by my new species? Rulers often had a similar gift, that made their communications impossibly appealing as a way of helping to keep the population under control and cooperative.

“When we get back to the house, I am going to show you some martial arts. With that kind of physicality, you need to know exactly what you are doing or you might not like the results. You are reasonably attractive, but when you move purposefully, it jacks that up to eleven.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“On a scale of one to ten, you become an eleven.”

“I don’t understand, that is mathematically impossible,” I stated.

She smiled a little, “Yes unless you cheat and add an extra number somewhere it should not exist. Your grace adds that number.”

“Oh,” I remarked, again. From that point of view, it made perfect sense. In the same way the system giving you a strength boost due to your abilities could boost you past your species' maximum physical capacity.

“Do we have a strategy?” Jessica asked Jim, as the rest of the team approached the tunnel.

He nodded, “Yes. At least we hope so. If they are smart enough to plot team tactics, they might not just blindly attack if Tracy puts point of attraction on Terminator. They will probably consider him the greatest threat, but if we follow the trope, They’ll still likely try to target the party members that look the most vulnerable first and then move their attention to him quickly. Does point of attraction defeat an intelligent opponent?”

I shook my head, “I doubt it very much. Otherwise, in something like a war, it would be far too powerful. It just tends to focus attention, nothing about it seems to increase hostility, it’s just that if there is hostility, an opponent is likely to see him as the primary point.”

Jessica was looking at me oddly, and I sort of half shrugged at her. If there was something she needed to tell me, I supposed she would?

She shook her head. I supposed she would tell me later.