Pocket Dungeon, page 4
My brow furrowed, and I peered over the island toward the sound of the voice. Sure enough, on the ground, the treasure chest I’d tried to pry open earlier had transformed.
And moved.
“Whaaaat the hell?” I muttered.
Now, instead of looking like any other treasure chest, the chest had stumpy little legs and sharp teeth. The creature had no discernable eyes, but I had a feeling that two evenly placed whorls in the wood of the not-chest were what the creature saw out of.
“Howdy!” the chest said, and my eyebrows shot up into my hairline.
It was beyond strange to watch it speak. Its mouth was the seam where the chest would have normally opened. It was like watching a really weird puppet speak, if said puppet had large sharp teeth.
“Uh,” I managed. “Who are you?”
“I’m a chest mimic, call me Mimic,” the chest mimic introduced itself. “I’ll eat any equipment that you don’t want and give you gold in return. Have any snacks for me?”
I’d had an objectively weird few hours, but somehow, this felt stranger than anything else I’d experienced so far.
The treasure chest was talking to me.
What kind of Beauty and the Beast shit was this?
I cleared my throat. “No… I think I’m okay for now.”
“That’s alright,” Mimic sighed. Could it even sigh? “Put everything you intend to keep in the lockers. It’ll be here next time you come to do a dungeon. This is where all of your loot and equipment is stored.”
“Next time?” I blurted out.
The treasure chest nodded matter-of-factly. Well… it didn’t have a neck or a head to nod, but it kind of bent in half a few times in a way that made me think the dude was nodding.
“Next time…” I repeated in utter bewilderment.
Then I realized the little wooden guy had also said “loot,” and I perked up a bit.
I definitely had looted a decent amount of solid gold today.
That wasn’t something to turn my nose up at.
“Soooo… I just put it in the lockers?” I asked, just to make sure, as I started to remove the rest of the gold and weapons from my body. I managed to form quite a large pile on the center of the island.
I felt like my eyes might bulge out of my head as I stared at the giant mound of gold. I didn’t think I’d ever seen that much gold in my entire life. It was practically a comical amount.
“Yep!” Mimic announced cheerfully. “Or just leave your stuff on the table in the center, and I’ll organize it for you based on the level of the item.”
“Level?” I was more confused than I wanted to admit.
“Well, maybe level isn’t the right term,” Mimic said.
The chest started to waddle toward me on its stumpy wooden legs, and suddenly, two wooden arms extended from its sides. Its fingers looked like they were made of some sort of metal.
This was insane.
“Oh,” I said as a realization dawned on me. “The white text, right? I think I recognize that sort of system from video games. Do you… know what a video game is?”
“Exactly! You’re one smart cookie,” Mimic said. “The different items and loot you’ll get have different rarity levels, and as the rarity levels increase, so does the power of the item. Pretty handy system, isn’t it? Just leave all your stuff there, and I’ll have it all organized for you later. I promise I won’t even take a bite.”
I hesitated but took a step back from the table. It might have been insane to be talking to a sentient chest, but after everything I’d seen, I felt like I could trust Mimic.
He wasn’t trying to kill me or nakedly charging after me, at least.
“How do I leave?” I asked with some trepidation.
This was the part I’d been most worried about since waking up here, and I was half-expecting Mimic to suddenly turn into a demon as he cackled and informed me I could never leave.
“Just climb up that ladder!” Mimic instructed. He used one of his weird little arms to point toward the ladder and trapdoor I’d seen earlier.
Instead of being bolted and chained like it had been before I’d entered the dungeon, the trapdoor was now entirely exposed.
It must have been locked so people couldn’t leave after committing to a dungeon.
Which led me to once again wonder what the everloving hell was going on.
“Uh… thanks.” I turned toward the ladder.
“Wait!” Mimic exclaimed. “Don’t forget your gold!”
“The gold?” I asked. I looked back at the gleaming, glittering pile. “I can take it with me?”
“Sure can,” Mimic assured me.
I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scooped all of the coins back into my pockets until I felt sufficiently loaded down. Then I jangled with every desperate step I took toward the ladder.
“Thank you for all of the help,” I hastily said to the chest.
“Anytime!” The chest mimic scuttled over toward the table where my equipment rested as I started to climb up the ladder.
My muscles were sore already from everything I’d done earlier during the dungeon, but I felt a wave of energy wash over me as I pushed the trapdoor open.
Maybe I wasn’t dead after all.
Then a blinding amount of light filled the small square, and I couldn’t see anything as I continued to pull my way through the trapdoor on instinct.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I groaned as I realized blinding light was the least reassuring thing after the day I’d had. “I’d better fucking be alive…”
My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the light as I frantically wormed my way up onto solid ground. As soon as my feet were cleared of the little wooden door, I heard it snap closed.
The blinding light suddenly disappeared, and when I blinked, I was sitting on the living room floor of my shitty apartment.
“Oh, thank god,” I sighed.
For some reason, though, there wasn’t a single light on in the apartment. The crystal I’d gotten from the shop was next to me on the ground and glowing a strange green color.
When I reached down to pick it up, I was shocked to see that it was hot to the touch.
Either I had just had the weirdest, most realistic dream of my life, or… or everything that had just happened was real. I’d been in some sort of dungeon where I solved puzzles and slayed monsters.
And got gold.
I kept the crystal clutched in my hand as I pushed myself up to my feet. I felt a slight headrush, and my body ached, but more importantly, my pockets jangled and felt really heavy.
“No way,” I murmured.
I set the crystal down on the nearby end table before I reached into my pocket. Then I pulled out a handful of gold coins. I could barely see them in the dim light of my apartment, but I knew what I was looking at.
Three thoughts crowded my mind at once.
One, the power was out for some reason. Which was odd and inconvenient, but infinitely less interesting right now compared to the other two thoughts:
Two, the chest mimic had been right. I could bring the gold back with me.
Three, holy shit. I was going to be rich.
Chapter 3
When I woke up in the morning, I was mildly convinced I had simply dreamed everything that had happened to me the night before. Obviously I hadn’t really fought a giant spider or leapt over a series of increasingly distant tiles to cross a dungeon floor.
That would have been fucking crazy.
But when I walked out of the tiny bedroom in my equally tiny apartment, the pile of gold I’d dumped from my pockets was waiting for me in the middle of my living room floor.
It hadn’t been a dream.
And because it hadn’t been a dream, I needed to figure out what to do with the gold. It wasn’t like I lived in an explicitly bad part of Chicago, no more than any other part of the city, but I didn’t exactly want to leave a giant pile of gold just sitting on my living room floor where anyone could potentially find it.
I toyed around with the idea of simply stashing it under my bed like it was a pile of porno mags and I was a fifteen-year-old in the nineties, but I was a grown man with a Master’s degree in engineering, and even though I was currently working at a bookshop and not using my degree, while drowning in student debt, some things still felt beneath me.
So I settled on trying to pawn the gold, but that left me with quite a few questions that I needed to work out before I could even think about leaving the apartment.
As much as I dreaded the idea of trying to count up all of the little coins, I knew this was the first step I needed to take to get some sort of feel for how much gold I actually had on hand. I gave a tired yawn, started a pot of coffee, and then took my steaming mug with me into the living room.
I dropped down onto the ground in front of the pile of gold and started to count. I expected the process to be more than a little mindless, but I’d never been this close to so much gold in my entire life, so I fell into a rhythm of gaping and counting pretty naturally. By the time the mess of gold had been organized into nice and even little stacks of five, I was aware that I had ninety-seven pieces of gold.
I was almost drooling.
Each coin was about the size of a silver dollar, but a little misshapen around the edges. They sort of reminded me of the gold doubloons that were always in pirate movies.
With that question answered, it was time to move on to the next step in my process. I took a sip of my coffee and grabbed one of the stacks of five coins before I stood back up. I jiggled the gold in my hand as I made my way back to the kitchen on a mission.
I set my coffee mug down and began to rifle through all of my drawers in an attempt to find the kitchen scale that my mother had decided to gift me when I moved into my apartment. I had yet to figure out why she’d thought that I, someone who didn’t really cook or bake all that much, needed a kitchen scale, but I had the niggling feeling she just wanted to get it out of her own house.
After pulling open essentially every drawer in the kitchen and opening every cabinet, I finally found the scale tucked back behind a slightly warped cookie sheet and a muffin tin that I was fairly certain had also come from my mother.
The scale was on the older side, and instead of being digital, it had one of those little cups that rested on top of the scale base that was used to weigh things.
I made sure the scale was level on the counter before I dropped in one of the doubloons. I watched as the little needle on the scale bounced before finally settling at approximately a third of an ounce.
I grabbed a pen and paper from one of the many open junk drawers and jotted that down. Then I took the coin out and replaced it with a second doubloon. The number was just slightly off from a third of an ounce, but only by the smallest of decimals. Once again, I wrote down the number and replaced the gold coin with another.
After I weighed all five of the coins I’d brought from the living room, I scanned the short bit of data I’d collected. All of the coins were within a hair of a third of an ounce. It wasn’t the perfect sample size, but then again, I was using a kitchen scale my mother had thrust upon me to weigh gold coins I’d managed to bring back from a strange pocket dimension.
There had to be some leeway in the situation.
I grabbed my coffee mug off the counter and took another long sip as I looked back at all of the gold in the living room. Then I did some quick math in my head. I had ninety-seven pieces of gold that all weighed approximately a third of an ounce, which meant I had about thirty-two ounces of gold in my apartment.
Two pounds worth of gold.
“Shit,” I murmured around the rim of my coffee mug.
I set it back down on the counter and grabbed the coins from my little test and brought them back to the rest of their friends in the living room.
The next step was figuring out how much gold was even worth, because I wasn’t in my eighties, so I didn’t exactly keep up with the price of gold. A cursory Google search made my eyes nearly bulge out of my head.
Gold was currently worth almost two thousand dollars an ounce, and I had thirty-two of them sitting in my living room and lined up in piles like little toy soldiers.
I felt a little weak in the knees and had to sit down on the edge of the couch as I tried to wrap my head around the sheer amount of money I’d just managed to bring back with me. That was more than I made in a fucking year, if my quick mental math was correct.
Just to make sure, I slotted the numbers into the calculator on my phone, and sure enough, it was about fifty-six thousand dollars.
Yeah, that was definitely more than I made in a year at Page Turner.
After giving myself a few minutes to process the absolute insanity of what was in front of me, I moved on to trying to figure out what I should even do with this much gold. It wasn’t like I could just bring it all to the bank, could I?
According to the preliminary research I did via Google, I could potentially sell my gold to a bank, but under a set of highly specific circumstances that I was unlikely to find with my bank, so I crossed that off my list. That left three main options for selling: I could go to a pawnshop, a gold dealer, or I could package up the gold and ship it out to sell to an online buyer. It looked like if I sold in person, I could expect some sort of cash payment, and online could be sent via a check or a direct deposit to my bank.
If I brought it to a pawnshop, I might not get all that it was worth according to my own estimates, but it wasn’t like I knew the exact karat of the gold, either, so there was some wiggle room here. A gold buyer was probably going to be the best option, and I knew there were quite a few of them in Chicago. But if I wanted the money fast, a pawnshop would be better.
The third option was intriguing. When I took into account the fact that I had a ton of gold and planned on getting a ton more gold, online seemed like a way to draw less suspicion in person.
After some more time spent on Google to figure out the best places in my area that I could go to, and the best buyers online for gold coins, I finally decided that I would try out all three options, not only to see what worked best, but as a way to break up any sort of trail I might leave with the gold.
Google hadn’t exactly been helpful when I’d searched “can you be arrested for selling gold from a pocket dimension that you got for killing monsters and solving puzzles,” but I wasn’t exactly keen on the notion of something going wrong.
This crystal situation was a literal gold mine. There was no way I’d fuck this up with poor planning.
By breaking up the places I cashed the gold, I was putting more distance between myself and anything that could go wrong, while also finding out how to get the best bang for my buck, so to speak.
I was still in a state of awe as I stood up from my couch and made my way into my room to quickly get dressed.
I had over a year’s worth of salary just sitting on my floor like it was nothing. That was fucking insane.
There were a few shops, both pawn and gold dealers, within walking distance from my apartment building, so I broke out the satchel my parents had given me as a graduation gift. I had never been exactly sure why they’d given me a satchel that looked straight out of an adventure movie, but I certainly appreciated the gesture now. The satchel was only slightly less conspicuous than the Nike duffel bag shoved in the top of my closet.
I hesitated as I debated just how many of the coins I wanted to bring with me before I settled on taking forty of the ninety-seven. I could attempt to pawn ten or so of them, just to see what that got me, and then I could try to sell the remaining thirty to a gold buyer. I’d ship out the rest to one of the online appraisers and buyers that offered the best rates.
It felt strange to scoop up a handful of gold and unceremoniously drop it into my satchel, but that’s what I did. I gave the remaining gold one last look before I made my way out of my apartment like a man on a mission.
Holy shit, I’d never had a buzz like this in my life.
The walk from my apartment was brisk, and I felt like I was thrumming with energy as I made my way to the sort of sketchy-looking pawnshop. I double-checked the map directions, and sure enough, this was the right store. All the reviews praised the owner for his business acumen, so I figured that it was worth a go.
There were thick, heavy-duty metal bars blocking the front door and windows, and a large grate that looked like it pulled down over the storefront at night.
I’d never been in a pawnshop before, but all of the weird, shitty pawnshop reality television shows had prepared me for the experience.
On the inside of the store, there was what could only be described as a ton of shit laid out everywhere. The store, helpfully listed on Google as “Pawn Shop” and nothing more, was longer than it was wide, and I felt like I was traipsing through another labyrinth like the dungeon the night before as I wandered through aisle after winding aisle of knickknacks that someone had to sell for a quick buck.
I saw a guitar in a glass case with a plaque that advertised it as one of Elvis’ very own, as well as what appeared to be a jewel-encrusted panther statue next to a particularly creepy-looking diorama of a school. I had no idea what any of the items had in common except the fact they were apparently worth money.
And money was what I needed.
I didn’t exactly have much liquid income with my job at the bookstore. But I liked my job. Well. I liked my job as much as someone with not one but two degrees could like any job that paid minimum wage. It kept me from living on the street, and sometimes I was even able to buy the really fancy packets of ramen noodles as a treat instead of the old standby Maruchan Beef twelve-pack.
And even though my job wasn’t what I had expected from my life, I really did love it. I had always been a big reader, so it was nice to work at a place where that was not only appreciated, but encouraged. Besides, when I had some down time on the job, I was able to get lost in whatever book I had on hand. It was certainly better than any other minimum wage job I could have found.
It was definitely a better fit for me than what I imagined working in this pawnshop would be.
