The employee entrance to the dungeon was ajar. I guess I didn’t need dad’s badge after all. A rusted metal sign above, barely hanging on to the bolts meant to secure it to the frame said “It has been [4] since the last accidental dismemberment.”
I pushed open the door and looked inside. It was a coat room of sorts, rows of lockers for employees running off into the darkness. A few magical torches sputtered on the wall, throwing a dim and dancing light on the walls.
I called out, not expecting any answer, and received none. Before my dad died I knew the dungeon was in trouble. He’d been replaced as a room guard by rust monsters, and had to take a demotion to wandering goblin to keep his job and health benefits for us. But I hadn’t realized that the entire dungeon had closed.
Whatever had happened here looked like it had been quick. Several of the lockers were open and socks and bits of uniforms and armor lay abandoned on the floor.
I spent a few minutes wondering whether going inside was a hot idea. I really had no clue what to expect inside. For all I knew the place was full up on barbarians running amok.
I did locate my father’s locker. There was a yellowed and faded picture of me taped to the door. I couldn’t have been more than six, wearing a glove about the same size as I was and a yellow hat with my little league team logo, The Backstabbers.
The locker had a heavy padlock on it, and none of the stuff I got from my dad’s boobytrapped glove box was an appropriate key.
***
The exit from the locker room led through a secret door into the dungeon proper. I brought one of the sputtering magical torches with me, as a well as a piece of paper and pen. If I had learned one thing from watching my dingbat players, it was that mapping was essential.
The dungeon was thankfully empty, not a single berserker. I wasn’t terribly worried about any monsters as I was wearing my dad’s employee badge. The dungeon union was strong, and eating union members was strongly discouraged.
This, it occurred to me, was very much unlike the Pandemonium Warehouse, where employees getting messily devoured by other members of the staff was an all too common occurrence.
***
The place felt eerily familiar.
At first I thought it was because I had grown up my father’s son, and even though he never really talked much about work, some details must have been there, even if I couldn’t have made sense of them without context.
But as I mapped out room after room, I realized that wasn’t it at all. The place was eerily familiar because I’d been staring at the map for the past few weeks.
This was the dungeon of descent. Whoever had written it, had modeled it after a real life dungeon. Specifically, this real life dungeon.
I had this revelation just as I wandered into what I realized was room 6b, and saw 4 mouldering skeletons on the ground surrounded by their gear, which had been torn apart and looted. Each of the skeletons had several arrows sticking of its desiccated ribs. I picked one up, and saw a tiny inscription on its shaft. “Eye Gouger.”
This is what Useless Lou had carved into his arrows. But how was that possible?
At that movement there was a flash of blue light, and an ancient and forlorn looking wizard appeared next to me and said, “Fight the dominant topology!”
I ran.
