CWD: OE ~ Nineteen

Basic needs covered and tension broken, the group started heading slowly down the stones of the circular staircase. At first glance, the steps looked like regular stone rectangles, until Nacho noticed that the small platforms were actually a combination of triangles and circles that fit together well, but not perfectly. After descending down half a dozen of the unusual steps, Jennifer was the one that finally voiced her concerns. “Do the words ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ mean anything to you guys?”

Reuben turned to stare at her, the whites of his eyes showing clearly. “No. We don’t speak words like that here. I took Statistics to avoid opening myself to that insanity.”

Nacho glanced at the architecture one last time before asking, “Is this pertinent to our success or survival, Jen? Or are you just making conversation?”

“No,” she slowly acknowledged, then immediately amended her opinion. “Maybe. The circles and triangles on the steps are definitely different, and I’m thinking… you remember how everything was candy on our side? Maybe it’s a theme from our worlds, to introduce or ‘welcome’ us to this new society.’”

“I love that idea. Not sure how we’re going to defeat math, but I will admit that it's been a dream of mine since I was a child,” Reuben promised the group far too seriously, just as the System chimed in with a long message.

Welcome, Player, to the Skillz Slammer, the Welcome Dungeon for you round-pupiled humans who’ve come traipsing through the Portals set up between your Home Sweet Home and CruxTerra. This is a classic CruxTerran dungeon, which means you’ll encounter things both beautiful and strange to your chaotic minds.

You’ll want to fight your way to the Skillz Cube. There, we will offer you Rare or complex abilities that will blow your mind and ruin your purse! This is going to be a special experience that you will treasure for the rest of your lives.

However short that may be!

Guess what, sports fans? With the CruxTerrans finding their Welcome Dungeon, and you Earthlings finally locating yours, you have unlocked the Starvation Dungeon! You won’t be able to start the Starvation Dungeon until your rivals, the CruxTerrans, are in position on the Earth’s Starter World, and then it’s a race to the end!

Both of your worlds are Starter Worlds, and in the Starvation Dungeon, you’ll be competing to see which world gets to move on to the next round of happy-fun futures!

This is a zero-sum game, Player! One side can’t win if the other side doesn’t lose. We didn’t make the rules; we’re just enjoying them.

Good luck, brave Player, and may your future be delicious!

They collectively stopped in the middle of the strange triangle-and-circle adorned chamber to take in what all that might mean. The Brewer seemed to be the kind of person that couldn’t keep their internal thoughts private for long, and she naturally spoke up first. “All this talk about Starvation Dungeons is making me hungry all of a sudden. Can I have one of these donuts you guys keep mentioning?”

“You’re gonna want something else,” Nacho admitted with a grunt as his friends snorted at him. “I have an old pocket pancake left? Those weren’t bad.”

“Are you being serious right now?” Brie rested one hand on her face, her elbow supported by her other arm braced across her stomach as she sighed.

“Yeah, nothing sells a pancake more than pulling an ‘old’ one out of your pocket and offering it to me with a creepy grin.” Jennifer joined Brie in shaking her head, while Reuben and Nacho locked eyes and shrugged.

“Food is food.” Nacho was having trouble understanding the issue. “Am I wrong?”

Brie flatly replied, “You’re wrong.”

“You’re right, Nacho. I don’t get it either,” Reuben commiserated with him at the same time his wife spoke.

“You don’t get an opinion on this.” Brie pulled Mr. Lacrosse Stick from storage and rested it on her shoulders. “Might I remind you that I’ve seen you pull pizza from under a couch, get really excited because it was a ‘surprise from past you’, and eat it?”

“It was still in the box,” Reuben protested earnestly. “Can we talk about this dungeon, please? I’m thinking it’s your classic dungeon-nested-inside-a-dungeon situation, kind of like the UnderFun. We go through the ‘Skillz Slammer’ first to get new abilities, and then we have to find the entrance to the Starvation Dungeon, which sounds like some kind of endgame event. I’m hoping that with both a Brewer and a Common Cook, we might be able to get through this without, you know, actually starving?”

“Still hungry,” Jen muttered softly, intentionally not looking at the pancake Nacho was holding out for her.

The cook shook his head. After dealing with the Juxtaposition longer than anyone else, he knew better than Reuben on the subject. “Not so sure it’s going to be that easy. When the Patrons talk about starving, I think they mean it. Most likely, they’re going to change the rules regarding how our Hunger and Thirst Points work. We’ll just have to cross that buffet line when we get to it.”

Jennifer sighed and rubbed her growling stomach. “Can someone either feed me, or let us move on? I was held captive by those necromancers for a long time…”

“Have a peanut butter ball.” Brie handed over the treat and started progressing down the stairs. “Let’s get going, everyone. It’s not going to get any easier if we wait around. Everything is getting stronger, and we need to stay ahead of the curve.”

“Would you say that we need to do… anything in particular?” Reuben poked at her. “Something that, perhaps, we dairy sacks should consider being in order to prevent ourselves from rotting?”

“Seriously, Reuben? We aren’t in a comic book, I don’t need a tagline, and I certainly don’t need to shout it every five minutes, do I?” Brie let out a huff of annoyance as he shook his head in mock incomprehension, eyes gleaming. “Fine! Stay fresh… cheese bags.”

“I am so incredibly motivated to be fresh right now.” Reuben practically skipped down the stairs with a chipper spring to each movement. “Let’s go solve math’s problems instead of letting it work things out on its own!”

They descended farther down the stairs with the Firefly Potstickers fluttering about to light the way. They weren’t in Active Combat, so Nacho considered taking a few minutes to make more peanut butter balls and Life Hack yogurt, but he was also well aware that every second counted. They were on CruxTerra to rescue their friends, and apparently something in here held the fate of their entire world in the balance. He’d just have to hope that he’d get Store access again soon, and that his current supplies would be enough.

The circular staircase culminated in a landing that opened up onto a grand hallway with a sloped ceiling. The floor continued with the imprinted triangles and circles, but the walls and ceiling were covered in small, colorful tiles to create a mosaic of images.

It was also strangely warm in the room, though there was no discernible heat source. Too warm. Nacho found himself sweating, and not from nerves. He’d delved down into any number of pits on his own Starter World, but he didn’t know what kind of horrors awaited them here. “How different do you think things really are in this world?”

“I mean… the people cheerfully live with a number and letter designation in lieu of names. I think things are very different.” Reuben shook the sausage clips around his wrists, letting them jangle against his armor. “We should watch out for traps, if we can even recognize them. I also wouldn’t recommend touching anything. Ya just never know.”

“Good thinking.” Nacho cautiously approached a wall on his right, inspecting the tiled mural curiously. The mosaics depicted two people, a man and a woman, emerging from the blue pods of a tree. Following the design up, more people joined the two people to create one big happy kingdom, complete with a castle on the left wall.

Jennifer sidled up to him, leaning her head back to look at the ceiling. “It tells a story, right? This world’s Adam and Eve, emerging from those weird trees, and they have kids, and they get a big castle—it moves right to left, like Japanese mangas.”

“If we’re thinking of it like that, as their world history,” Brie pointed at the next section, “then the people join together in a big happy kingdom, until they get unhappy and split.”

The next mosaic displayed a collection of castles, each with a different flag. Some flags showed two hearts, others showed eyes with a vertical slit, very reptilian, while still others showed a tree with the odd pods. It was obvious that the symbols indicated the different kingdoms.

Seven kingdoms in total had spread across seven continents. Nacho was surprised at the eyes—the pupils very clearly weren’t crosses in these images. Did their crosses come later? Was it a natural evolution, or had it been done for some other reason?

His eyes traversed the ceiling, locating a massive display in which armies started crossing oceans, each bearing a different flag. The wars seemed epic in scale. Some of the soldiers brandished curved swords, while others wielded strange half-moon axes, but most carried the long-bladed pikes that they’d witnessed the undead wielding back on Earth.

Reuben clutched his leather Helm of Helming with one hand as he craned his neck. “Those weapons are called naginatas back on Earth. The CruxTerrans went through their own warring feudal period here, it seems.”

On the far wall, a small boy pulled a naginata out of a stone, and all of the various armies bowed down to him. The mural seemed to indicate a time of peace that followed this.

The Healer randomly laughed. “You think King Arthur transmigrated? How about Merlin?”

“I don’t understand.” Brie glanced back at her husband, smiling softly as she observed the sheer happiness on his face, “What is transmigrating?”

“It’s what we just did—no, actually, this is a classic portal fantasy now.” Reuben chuckled and rubbed his hands together in glee that he got to explain the concept. “It means someone that unexpectedly travels to a new world and has to learn all the new customs, even though they get to keep their memories. Usually.”

“Ah. Fiction. Books.” Brie returned her attention to the tiled artwork as Reuben glanced at her with a complicated expression.

“Fiction? Are we living through the same Armageddon?”

Nacho ignored their good-natured bantering and walked to the next section, finding more modern-looking cities, though again, each city had distinct banners, though there seemed to be a general culture of growth and peace. All the way until war broke out, again. The main difference was that this section included guns, tanks, and fighter planes. They were definitely at least into the Earth’s modern age.

Each of the warring nations had a name now. Were they nations or families? Nacho wasn’t sure. He read through the list—the Qua, the Mac, the La, the Sno, the PewJack, the Bus, and the Ye.

The fighting shifted into a single image that left a chill in Nacho’s heart for some reason. The single-eye banner—still with a vertical pupil—was carried by a man wielding a long-bladed spear. The figure had a name displayed in golden tiles under his combat boots—Ridiquool PewJack, the very first of the PewJack leaders, it seemed.

PewJack soon had all the other banners at his feet, allowing his alone to stand. It seemed the different societies on the planet, across all seven continents, now had a definitive ruler.

Down the wall to the left, PewJack the Second stood with the same banner, only with the addition of a horizontal line on the eye that created the cross-shaped pupils. But why? What happened with the subsequent rulers and the eyes?

“Okay, so are you reading that like I’m reading it?” Reuben tapped on the tile, blatantly ignoring his previous recommendation to touch nothing.

Jennifer was catching up to them, having taken more time to look over the details. “The PewJack family won, but where did the cross-shaped pupil come from? Did you guys notice that?”

“I didn’t. But it looks like the CruxTerrans had a modern age like we did.” Nacho had progressed to the end of the grand hallway and was inspecting a very solid-looking wooden door with a huge iron bar across the middle. He wasn’t ready to open that door just yet. Something told him that it was the only reason they hadn't needed to deal with monsters as they studied the murals.

“Well, they are up to PewJack the Fourth,” Jennifer walked to the last part of the wall, where the heroic-looking leader stood not with a rifle, but the banner and a curved sword, while monsters poured out of a radically changed world of blue trees and medieval soldiers wielding naginatas.

“Interesting that he has a sword, and not a spear,” Nacho mused aloud as his attention was pulled to the image.

Brie pointed at the final mosaic with her lacrosse stick. “That’s the Juxtaposition. These guys had the same thing happen to their planet that we did.”

“Looks like it.” Reuben took another pass under the more modern history. “Only, they had a one-world government and they liked eggs. Is it me, or is there a ton of scrambled egg action up there? Look… anywhere an egg shows up, it’s scrambled. I wonder why? Are eggs different in this world?”

Nacho joined the big guy and took a look, his professional curiosity roused. He hadn’t noticed it before, but yes, he could see now that under the rulership of the one-world government, yellow-feathered chickens were everywhere. The murals had included a surprising surplus of odd, orange-colored eggs, and he spotted more with every glance. Chefs in different buildings stood over stoves that looked exactly the same, handing out scrambled eggs to people in lines. “Now that you have my attention on this, I admit that it’d be interesting to buy a CruxTerran cookbook.”

“Let’s just get going.” Brie was clearly done with the history lesson. “There haven't been any monsters, and there haven't been traps. Let’s count ourselves lucky and try the door so we can save our friends. They aren’t some sort of side quest that we can ignore until we’re ready to get to it!”

“Whoa!” Reuben pulled Brie back as she grabbed at the iron bar. “If there is a trap, I’d imagine it’s there. Wish we had a rogue with a trap-finding skill. Or a secret door skill. But—”

It had been quiet, but suddenly, beyond the big door, came the rattle of chains. It was the typical spine-tingling poltergeist sound, and it was close. It also sounded rather angry at being kept waiting.

“Prisoners maybe?” Jennifer looked a little pale, the unknown sounds messing with her imagination. “You think people are locked up in here?”

The small group went quiet, trying not to insult her with their answers. Sighing, Nacho decided to explain for her benefit. “How much dungeon diving have you done?”

“Never did spend much time playing video games. Now, during the last… almost a year now, huh? I mostly stayed back at camp, and, you know, brewed. Brewer here, and all that. The Patrons warned me it might be boring, but boring was kind of nice after all the fighting I had to do in the Evaluation World.”

“Hurray for boredom,” Nacho agreed calmly. “Now, to be clear, there are only monsters in there. If it looks like captive people, all they’re trying to do is lure you into an ambush. Believe nothing and suspect everything. Absolute paranoia is the only way to stay alive in dungeons like this. All set?”

“Sure?” Jen seemed slightly confused still, but she decided to cover for it by eating the peanut butter ball that Brie had given her. She clearly had not been expecting a screen to pop up in front of her face, judging by the way her eyes went wide and flashed blue.

“Ah, right. Good point. I think we should all eat and raise our stats before we try the door. I have a feeling that Active Combat is in our near future.”

“Care to sample my balls, love?” Reuben offered his food pouch full of peanut-buttery goodness to Brie, getting a punch in the arm for his phrasing. “Ow! What! Why?”