Chương 188: CDM 3, Chapter 64: PR Problem

Bro. All this time, and you just sat there listening to me say dumb shit. I should have put it together sooner, so I feel like even more of an idiot. I mean, damn, I worked with you every day, even went on a crawl with you, and I still didn't see it. I guess this is why I didn't test into the investigation team. I'm getting you back for this.

I don't know what I can do that's the equivalent of you pretending to be a chick on the internet and then listening to me talk about how hot the pretend you is, but I'll figure something out. Does that mean the other chick on the China trip was your little sister? I don't even feel bad saying it. Your sister is hot. Is that awkward for you? Good. She's fine as hell. Mother fucking Dorion Carmino is a Dungeon Diva. Jesus.

I get why you kept it a secret, but I'm still going to hold this against you for the rest of your life. -Dante Shortly after that email, Beth texted the group chat.

"Umm… We just dropped like 25% of our subscribers. Anyone know what's happening?" A moment later she added,"Oh. I just saw the video. So the secret is out, huh?" The video Beth referred to was the same video that prompted Cortez's email. Even homesteading werewolf children had smartphones, it seemed. Clips of the battle's aftermath ended up online. Megan looked like a badass dragging bugbear corpses around with her helmet off. Hornby received hundreds of heartfelt thank-yous for healing injured townspeople.

Giago helped a few of the wounded off the wall. Nathan and de Saint drove into town with the ice cream truck music playing. And me? I sat around grimacing because my ribs shanked me over and over like I was the biggest douche on the cellblock. But I didn't care. No, that's a lie. I cared a lot, but I wasn't that upset about it. Compared to having a snarling bugbear pinning me to the ground, a less-than-flattering video of me on the internet was trivial. Admittedly, I had yet to brave any of the comment sections.

I wondered if I could summon the self-control to never read them. My mental health would surely be better off. At any rate, the secret was out. Too many individual clips from the bugbear raid showed very clearly that most of the Dungeon Divas were dudes. The morning after the post-battle dinner, Nathan and de Saint took point on recording a minidocumentary about life in Matewan and the methods they used to integrate lycanthropy into the day-to-day life of their community.

Techniques for teaching control during and after a transformation were the focal point, of course, but several less-serious details came out that I found just as interesting. When Matewans went hunting for game, they often traveled in pairs–one person in human form with a rifle and the other person in wolf form sniffing out potential prey. When local teens played a game of touch football, they specifically called out whether or not a "no wolf" rule was in effect.

If it wasn't, kids would transform mid-play to get an advantage in mobility or speed. I had never been much of a football fan, but the tactics that emerged from having werewolves on the field were entertaining to watch. A few of the oldest werewolves preferred their wolf forms because none of the arthritis or dimmed mental acuity transferred when they transformed. They could be spry and pain-free as wolves, giving them a unique lease on late life.

The dire guinea pig farm was technically separate from the lycanthropy topic, but it fascinated Nathan and de Saint, so they spent a good deal of time learning about how that process started and what the Matewans had learned from attempting to domesticate dungeon monsters. Were they the first to eat monster meat? No.

Hundreds of people had tried various monsters since the gates opened, but a few factors kept it from becoming mainstream: In addition to the longstanding taboo against eating such creatures, keeping monsters as pets or livestock was illegal in the vast majority of nations. If you didn't care about rules, containing and managing monsters was incredibly dangerous.

Dire guinea pigs, for example, weren't large organisms, but they could leap up to 20 ft to bite a person's throat and were devoted escape artists whenever they were caged, eating through wood and thin metals to get loose. The FDA mostly forbade the sale of gate-harvested foodstuffs, and the video we released about Matewan reignited the debate as to whether the FDA's position was motivated by safety or the lobbying of major beef, pork, and poultry producers.

The truth was likely somewhere between many dungeon meats being toxic to humans and not wanting to disrupt an already fragile agricultural economy. Matewan was proof that monsters could be a sustainable food source, though. They ate all kinds of other meats in addition to guinea pig, but the per-pound return they got on raising dire guinea pigs significantly outpaced the yield from raising cows or pigs. They were scary as shit, though. Going near their enclosure was like kicking a beehive.

As soon as they smelled an interloper, they went wild, their squeaky barks mixing with the sound of their bodies crashing into fencing, searching for a weak point where they could break through and escape. One of the curious kids following around Nathan and de Saint described them as "land piranhas." The image that conjured of what an encounter with a wild herd of the monsters might be like disturbed me. All of this Dungeon Divas content would go up on Domestic Dungeons as well.

Not only had we amassed a great deal of field experience hunting bugbears, but we could write in-depth entries about Earth-born werewolves and how they could live peacefully amongst other humans. That was sure to stir controversy, but Matewan was running perfectly fine before we showed up. Their circumstances aside, these people were incredibly normal. As far as I was concerned, if we could take one item off the list of "reasons the world will end," that was fantastic news for everyone, not just werewolves.

We ended up leaving Matewan as the sun set and drove nonstop back to Pittsburgh, getting into the guild house around 2 a. m. A very sleepy Beth greeted us with hugs. I savored the moment of having a family to love me and fell into bed, my old mattress suddenly feeling like the pinnacle of luxury. I woke up a little after 9 the next morning and found Megan sitting at the kitchen table with her mouse and her laptop when I went to make a cup of tea. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval.

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"Have you been up this whole time?" Megan nodded.

"We have to start getting videos up." She had spent most of the trip home editing footage in the back of the van, citing the same urgency. If I had known she never intended to sleep, however, I would have stayed up with her.

"You can't give yourself one day off?" I asked.

"Have you looked at our subscriber numbers this morning?"

"No…"

"We're down 40% from where we were before Matewan." Pain lanced through my heart.

"Jesus. Can I do anything to help?"

"Nope. I'm finished. An hour and a half of bugbear hunting followed by 30 minutes of learning about Matewan werewolves." Megan emphatically clicked her mouse like she was pressing the launch button for a missile salvo and sat back.

"Beth is going to pull clips for socials, but our part is done."

"Thank you. I feel bad you did all of that by yourself."

"Nathan and de Saint helped. It's okay. Oh, shit!" Megan dropped her face into her hands.

"What? What's wrong?"

"I'm supposed to let everyone review it first. I got locked in on finishing or something. Fuck. Should I pull it down?" I came around the table and gave Megan a side hug.

"No, it's fine. Leave it up, and go get some sleep."

"Are you sure? I can't believe I just did that."

"It was pretty fucking inconsiderate of you to stay up all night rush-editing a boatload of footage to help our collective business weather a storm. I mean, how dare you?"

"Is that sarcasm?" I laughed.

"Yes. Are you going to bed, or do you want a cup of tea?"

"Bed." Without another word, Megan closed her laptop and staggered down the hall to her and Nathan's apartment. I put frozen waffles in the toaster and sat to scroll while I sipped my tea. I liked not being in a moving vehicle and not waking up in the middle of nowhere in a sleeping bag that was somehow too hot and too cold at the same time. My phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, so I let it go to voicemail and continued scrolling.

They left a voicemail, which sucked for them because I never listened to those. Then another call. And another. Then the texts started.

"I'm a writer with DungeonBuzz. Are you available today for an interview?"

"This is Crawler Central PR. Do you need an agent? We'd love to work with you."

"After being a suspect in Martin Kielar's murder, how do you feel about Bashir's death?" Oh no. I plugged my name into an internet search. Stories about Dorion "Uncle Gray" Carmino abounded. The internet was on a mission to ID each of the Divas, so I shouldn't have been surprised that my name was uncovered, but it still made me profoundly uncomfortable. That was made worse by the volume of material sleuths were able to dig up.

They found a security video of an angry crawler punching me in a bar, which also showed Beth hitting him in the back of the head with a chair. I had never seen that video myself, and I was unimpressed by how quickly my body folded when I took that punch to the face. Footage of Baker threatening me on my undercover crashing op. Multiple bodycam perspectives of my early morning arrest when Kielar was murdered. A fresh interview with one of the settlers on the ogre crawl, recounting the details of the tragedy.

My expunged record for vagrancy and trespassing charges from when I was 18. Me standing around a bunch of ambulances and cop cars, shell-shocked after the shadow hunter debacle. Someone had even dug up my doomer roots and linked me to two citizens of New Eden. Christ. That didn't take long. 24 hours ago, I was one of a few hundred generic CDM office drones. Now, my entire life had been laid bare for all the internet to see.

Once the initial surprise subsided, I remembered what sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place: one of the journalists had asked about El-Tijani Bashir, the Sudanese ex-military who had been arrested for Kielar's murder. According to news reports, he died attempting to flee police custody, two months before his trial was set to begin. I hoped that meant the investigation would officially be closed. It was best for me and the people I cared about if that was the case.

If the internet had its way, however, it would continue. Even moderate news sources remarked on the suspicious convenience of Bashir's death.

"You alright, bro?" Nathan asked as he came into the kitchen.

"Yeah, I'll be fine. Kettle should still be hot if you wanted tea."

"I certainly do," he said, pouring himself a cup.

"Have you been mainlining your internet feed all morning?" I nodded.

"I think I might have been healthier without cellphone reception."

"Probably, but then you'd be bored as fuck. Who wants that?" I chuckled.

"Yeah, fair." A pair of waffles appeared in front of me.

"Oh, thanks. I forgot I put those down."

"Mind if I…?"

"Go for it." Nathan frowned at the sogginess of the waffle but didn't remark on it.

"So, what's fucking you up the most? Is it A: Our dramatic decline in viewership, B: The fall of New York City, C: The potential war brewing with super crawlers, or D: The fact that the internet now knows you as 'Uncle Gray?'" I sighed.

"I didn't read anything about B and C yet."

"Sorry, dude. They're not sure if they can reverse the blight slime poisoning. All of the refugees they evacuated will have to permanently relocate, probably. Sad shit, man. The stock market is well below Great Depression numbers because of it."

"And item C?" Instead of answering, Nathan unlocked his phone and texted me a link. It took me to a clip of Talatal Ghar, the city where uber-leveled crawlers were discovered. The United States military, accompanied by a few nations from Europe and Africa, was shown insisting on being let into the city, presumably to learn how its people leveled so high. A singular mage summoned three tornadoes of fire and wiped out more than 100 people in an instant.

They were mostly soldiers, but journalists and other noncombatants were among them. As a result, the United Nations urged everyone to pull back and leave the Kingdom of Assam alone, but U. S. senators and congresspeople called for "swift and decisive" retribution for the American lives that were lost.

"Have you ever seen that spell?" I asked. Nathan shook his head.

"Level 40 magery is scary as fuck, dude. Here, look what Louis said about the attack." He spun his phone around for me to see. The tweet from LootLootLouis read, "Every single one of us who met the Assamese knew these were serious people. We told every person we spoke to that they should be cautious and respectful. Did they listen? Nope. This is what happens when you fuck around in the crawler world."

"Hard to argue with him," I said. After a few bites of waffle, Nathan asked.

"Are you alright?"

"I'll be fine."

"Dude, no one would blame you if you weren't."

"We all got unmasked by this." Nathan shook his head.

"Technically, yeah, but you've led a more interesting life than the rest of us have, so they really drilled into you. People are already saying off-the-wall shit. Remember that they don't know what they're talking about. The internet takes a few facts and then fills in the big blanks with whatever gets the most clicks. That would mess with anyone."

"Thanks, but I'm good. I'm more worried about the subscribers we lost."

"Bro, fuck 'em. We're doing fine on cash, especially now that we're getting bounties on kills. I'm not worried about it."

"Really?"

"100%."