Pocket Dungeon 3, page 16
The other man nodded his head so hard I was worried he was going to snap his neck.
“Yeah, of course,” he said quickly. “I’m definitely fine to keep carrying a gun. Juliet’s always packing too, though I don’t really know if she has anything to worry about, considering she only met you guys once.”
I took a moment to detour from our rather important conversation.
“You’re still seeing Juliet?” I asked, and I was only barely able to hide how impressed I was at the fact.
Juliet was the hot, kind of scary, Lara Croft-esque woman who’d gotten us into the gun range for free before we took on Harper. Monty had a clear and obvious crush on her the first time they met, and after a week of dragging his feet, he’d finally gone back to the range to ask her out.
“We’re exclusive,” Monty said, and he didn’t bother to hide the hint of pride in his tone.
“Nice job, man,” I said. “She seemed great. And I’m glad to know you’ve got your own personal bodyguard.”
Monty snorted. “It’s not like that.”
“Well whatever it’s like, I’m happy for you,” I told him, and I really did mean it. Monty was a good guy who had been through some unpleasant shit. He deserved his own happy ending, too.
“Sorry for getting us off track,” he said. “This guy said he’d give his boss false information?”
“Right, yeah,” I said. “Which is good. I don’t want this guy so much as thinking about us. Because that ties into the next part of the plan.”
Monty raised an eyebrow.
“We’re going to break into Archibald Black’s house,” Elaene said in her soft, musical voice.
Monty’s head spun toward the Atlantean woman seated primly on the edge of the couch, and he gaped at her with his jaw hanging slack.
“Is she serious?” he asked me. “Like, the guy you just hyped up as being some mega rich monster? You’re going to break into his house? Why? For what?”
“It’s complicated, and there are a few more steps than that,” I said. “We have to get into a secret party run by this black market at a place called Warehouse Fourteen, according to the information Elaene managed to pick up before she was dropped back into a dungeon. And while we’re in the party, we need to get the key to Black’s house, and we need to try and get as much information as we can as to who actually runs this group.”
“Why?” Monty stressed the word again. “I’m sure there’s a damn good reason, but also it seems like you sort of have a death wish, or at least a super chronic thrill-seeking personality, Wes.”
“Because Elaene isn’t the only woman he bought at a black market auction,” Iris said. “We need to set them free and get them away from Black.”
“And we need to take his crystal,” I finished. “It’s essentially the secret code for getting in and out of all the events run by the black market, according to Elaene, and without it, it’ll keep Black from being able to commit more harm for the time being. It should give us enough time to really figure out who’s in charge and how to take this thing down from the inside. At least, that’s the hope.”
“Jesus,” Monty said after a few long beats of silence. “This is… intense. And here I was, hoping everything would be normal now that Harper’s gone.”
“If only,” Iris sighed.
“Wes, Yasha, and Iris have agreed to help me in my mission to right the wrongs committed by the man who yanked me from my own world,” Elaene said firmly. “Are you willing to help us as well?”
“Of course,” Monty said. “Whatever I can do, though I’m not sure there’s much…”
“First off, helping me with the gold is still a big help in all of this,” I told him. “It’s keeping a lot of stress off me that I really don’t need right now.”
“Yeah, of course man. I’m glad to do it,” he said. “It’s really no big deal.”
“The other thing you can do is keep your eyes peeled for anything suspicious. I know you’re trying to steer clear of millionaires and their bullshit, but you were a part of this world, too. If you hear anything–”
“I’ll tell you right away,” he said quickly. “Obviously. I want these assholes out of here, too.”
“Another thing,” I said. “Does the name Warehouse Fourteen ring any bells to you? I gave it a Google, but I wasn’t able to find anywhere in the area that uses that name. I’m not sure if it’s a code name or what.”
Monty’s brow furrowed, and he folded his arms over his chest as he clearly mulled over my words.
“It does sound a little familiar, but I can’t say off the top of my head,” he said. “After my date with Juliet tonight, I’ll do some digging and see if I can find out anything about it. I don’t really talk to anyone that was involved with Harper, other than you guys, but I might still have some connections I can reach out to, people who won’t run their mouths because they were just as fucked over as I was.”
“That would be really, really great,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s really no problem,” Monty said. “What else are friends for? Besides, you did save my life, and I know you’ve said I don’t have to keep trying to pay you back for that, but it’s sort of hard not to.”
“I stand by what I said,” I told him. “But I won’t turn up my nose to a little extra help here and there. Speaking of, I’ve got some more gold for you if you wanna switch out the contents of our bags.”
“Oh, sure, better than making Iris bring it out to me,” he said with a grin.
“I really don’t mind,” Iris assured him. “It’s nice to feel like I’m still helping, even when I’m not in the dungeons.”
“You are doing more than just helping,” I assured her. “You’re an absolute badass, and I feel about a thousand times safer with you and your gun around.”
I grabbed the bag of gold coins and jewels Yasha had carried in and placed on the coffee table and brought it over to where Monty stood at the kitchen island.
“Here,” I said. “Usually I’d count it first–”
“Because you have control issues,” Iris chimed in with a laugh.
“Because I have control issues,” I agreed as a grin spread across my face. “But considering you’re already here, I figured this would be easier. Plus, I it’s not just gold this time…”
As I spoke, I carefully dumped out the contents of the bag onto the kitchen island, and the beautiful sound of gold and precious stones hitting the Formica was like music to my ears.
Monty’s eyes went as wide as I’d ever seen them as the haul spread out into a small mountain on the island. He reached out, picked up one of the red stones, and held it up to the light, like he really was able to appraise the stone then and there.
“I’m no expert,” he said. “But this is insane. I’ve never seen a dungeon churn out this many gems all at once.”
“I’m beginning to think anything is possible with these dungeons,” I admitted. “Especially as we get higher up in numbers. This was a level twenty-one dungeon, and it was unlike anything we’ve ever faced before, not even counting the interrogation and the jewels.”
“What do you mean?” Iris asked. She’d wandered over to join us as Elaene and Yasha made themselves slightly more comfortable, and the familiar sound of A New Hope’s intro music began to blare through the soundbar.
“The dungeon spun,” I said bluntly. “It felt like we were on the ocean, or some sort of spinning axis with the real world outside the walls. It was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever experienced. I had no idea dungeons could be like that.”
“That’s crazy,” Monty said. “I didn’t have much contact with the other people going in and out of the dungeons, but some of the guards would talk sometimes, about what the people claimed to have experienced inside the crystals. I heard some crazy stuff, but never anything like that. And I’ve never seen anyone come out with as many stones as this before.”
“Well, do you know how high up the dungeons got under Harper?” I asked.
Monty hesitated for a moment before shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “But I have a pretty good feeling it was never anywhere near as high as where you’re at. I nearly died in a level nine dungeon, I can’t imagine the people he was using tended to get much higher than maybe fifteen. It was a job that, uh, definitely seemed to have a pretty high turnover rate if what I heard from the guards was true.”
“That’s still… hard to believe,” Iris said. “I guess I’ve never really thought about where the dungeons might be located spatially before. To me the idea of a dungeon has always just been something that exists in a place all its own.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I admitted. “But now I’m rethinking everything. I can’t tell if the feeling of wind and the smell of the ocean was just another trick played by the dungeon to try and disorient us or what, but it’s definitely given me some things to think about, that’s for sure.”
“It sounds like you were in a place similar to my home,” Elaene said. The dark-haired woman had moved so quietly, I hadn’t even heard her approaching at all, but suddenly she was right next to me, with her long, wavy hair tucked behind her oddly beautiful ears.
She darted her tongue out to run it over her lower lip, as if she was nervous to be talking about any of this, and I was once again given a glimpse of her pearly, sharply pointed teeth. It was easy to notice the sheen and shimmer to her skin with her standing this close to me, and I found myself enchanted by it.
She was awfully hard to look away from, but up close, she was nearly impossible to ignore. Her beauty was so much like the ocean that I couldn’t mentally disconnect the two. They both were simultaneously serene with intense strength brewing beneath the surface, and like the ocean, Elaene moved with impossible grace, even on injured feet. She even smelled faintly of the sun and the sea.
I cleared my throat to shake the distracting thoughts from my mind.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Is Atlantis a… weird wooden top on the ocean?”
It felt absurd, even as the words came out of my mouth, but it also felt worth asking at the same time. I had no idea what was true and what wasn’t when it came to the various worlds attached to the dungeons, and if I’d learned anything, it was to expect the unexpected.
Monty’s face went pale, and he looked between the two of us at a strangely rapid clip, like he wasn’t quite sure if he’d heard us right.
He even raised one hand up into the air, like he was a student hesitantly trying to ask a question from a particularly grueling professor.
“Uh,” he managed. “Did you just say Atlantis? The lost–”
“It is not lost!” Elaene huffed and threw her hands up in the air. “I know where it is. You have simply misplaced it.”
“Right,” Monty said in a slight daze. “Yeah, that makes sense. We… misplaced Atlantis.”
“It is that Atlantis, though,” I said and leaned over to pat his shoulder. He hadn’t known he was about to step into a bit of a sore spot for her. “But what do you mean, Elaene, that the dungeon sounds like Atlantis?”
“You were theorizing about where the dungeons are located, is that right?” she asked. She was standing a foot or so away from the rest of us, like she was still a little unsure about trying to move closer, but I considered that on its own an improvement. Any progress she made toward trusting us was fantastic in my book.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never really given it much thought before, but this one was different than the others. It felt like we were actually somewhere, instead of just… in the ether, or what have you. How does that relate to Atlantis?”
“Pocket dimensions,” Elaene said, like it was simply the most obvious thing in the entire world. “The dungeons, they are all pieces that have broken away from larger worlds. Like a crack off of a larger form that has drifted apart into something else entirely.”
“So, that’s what happened to Atlantis?” Iris asked. “It was once part of Earth, right? But it somehow broke away into its own pocket dimension.”
Elaene seemed pleased with Iris’ intuitive leap and nodded with a slight smile on her face.
“It is why our dialects are so similar,” she explained. “Atlantis was once a part of Earth, long, long ago, and there were many people like me inhabiting it, though this was before we were a kingdom beneath the waves.”
All eyes in the room, including Yasha’s, were on Elaene. It took a lot to get Yasha to focus on anything but Star Wars, so this must have been pretty impressive news to her, too.
“As I have been told, there is no discernible reason as to why the pockets form,” she continued. “But there are theories, such as the idea of too much crystalline energy in any one place. It causes a surge of power so strong it creates a portal into another dimension. Usually these portals are only large enough for a handful of people to pass through.”
“Which is how the crystals send people into dungeons,” I said.
“Exactly,” Elaene confirmed with a slight nod of her head. Since she’d started talking, she had started to brighten, like she was glowing from the inside out. It was the first time since we’d saved her she seemed really, truly alive, and the stirring in my chest made me want to keep making her feel like this for as long as I could.
It made her more beautiful than any sunset I’d ever seen.
“But there was once enough energy to break off Atlantis?” Monty asked. “Right?”
“Yes,” Elaene said. “It is one of the largest events of its kind, as far as I have been told. An entire country, a kingdom disappearing. It was only when Atlantis entered this pocket dimension that it fell beneath the waves. It was a great tragedy at the time, and many Atlanteans lost their lives, but those left were those with the best traits for the new world, and eventually, it led to our people as we are now.”
“And uh, what exactly does that mean?” Monty asked. “The ears?”
He gestured to his own ears, like she might not have any clue what he meant if he didn’t.
Iris snorted, but Elaene seemed to be unbothered by the goofy question and continued.
“Our ability to breathe underwater for a period of time,” she began to list. “As well as our tails, and our protective acid spray.”
Monty blinked a few times and looked at me, like I might be able to confirm whether or not this was some sort of massive practical joke. But when I didn’t, he looked back at Elaene with wide eyes.
“Holy shit, you’re serious.” He gripped the kitchen island to keep himself upright. “You have a tail? Where is it? What sort of tail?”
“It only appears when I will it, and the transformation is made easier while in water,” she said patiently. “It is similar to what Wes called a mermaid.”
“That’s what I thought she was when we first met her,” I explained. “But the tail went away as soon as she was out of the water.”
“This is fucking insane. Like, I thought Yasha was insane, because of the tail and everything, and then Iris, no offense.” He paused to look at Iris.
“None taken,” she said.
“Because you’re literally from a whole different time period, but an Atlantean?” He rubbed his face and took shallow breaths. It was pretty funny that he’d been able to handle the information about the black market rings with a relatively straight face, but as soon as he learned about Atlantis, he lost his ever-loving shit.
“You okay, man?” I asked and reached over to give his shoulder a gentle tap.
“I had such a crush on that Kida chick from that Atlantis movie as a kid,” he mumbled into his hands, and I nodded in agreement. “I’m trying to imagine telling a ten-year-old version of me that Atlantis is a real place. He’d piss himself.”
“Please don’t piss yourself now, though,” Iris said.
“Is Monty going to urinate on himself?” Yasha chimed in from her spot on the couch. Despite her clear curiosity in the conversation, she hadn’t needed to move to take it all in thanks to her superior hearing. Her ears were clearly pointed in our direction however, so I knew for a fact she’d been listening to it all.
“No,” I said.
“I hope not,” Monty said at the same time.
I took a slight step to the side, just in case he did piss himself, because I didn’t want to get Monty piss on my shoes. It wasn’t anything personal, I just really didn’t want any piss on my shoes, Monty provided or otherwise.
“Aaaanyway,” I dragged out the word. “That’s fascinating, Elaene. So, all of the dungeons are probably pieces of another world somewhere out there, but because of too much crystalline energy in one place, it caused a break off and they became dungeons.”
“Yes,” she said. “This has all happened long, long ago, and as far as I have been taught, Atlantis was the most recent of these break-offs, and one of the largest, and it occurred nearly a thousand years ago.”
“I guess that also helps explain why all the dungeons are so different,” I said. “But they all operate within the same principles. Does that have anything to do with the places they came from?”
“I believe that is something of the crystals’ own making,” Elaene said. “But I am no scholar or expert. It would take someone far wiser than me to explain how the labyrinth of connected crystals functions.”
“Well, luckily for you, I happen to know a scholar about the crystals, and I’ve been meaning to ask him some questions anyway,” I said. “And I think he’d love to meet you.”
“Oh, that big demon guy, right? Truck?” Monty asked.
“Trog,” I corrected. “Trog’thukaz.”
“He is not from Earth?” Elaene seemed puzzled by this.
“No, I met him in one of my first dungeons, and we hit it off,” I explained. “He’s a scholar back on his own world, and he researches the crystals and dungeons by going into them. He managed to figure out how to purposefully enter the dungeon of someone else so long as you know a specific sequence, like a thumbprint for each crystal.”
