Chương 69: CDM 2, Chapter 5: Legal Department

My phone buzzed around noon. I had managed to fall asleep after all.

"An E gate needs cullers by 2 p. m. Are you available?"

"Yes," I replied. An E gate was garbage experience, but it was something.

"Thank you for your service. I am texting you the address now." This gate was northwest of the city in an old steel town named Monaca. A few residents still lived there, from what I understood, but its prime was a distant memory. A bevy of manufacturers used to employ people for everything from drawn steel to enameled porcelain dinnerware, but all of those businesses had moved to Africa, either literally relocating or going bankrupt because they couldn't compete in a globalized economy.

The physical gate itself was the smallest I had ever seen. It looked like a wooden trapdoor from a medieval tavern but was upright instead of flat to the ground. Getting in and out would mean crawling on our hands and knees. But that was fine. I didn't mind a little crawling for some XP. I did mind, however, what kind of gate this was. When I pulled onto the site, several dozen yards away from the Ohio River in a wooded area, I groaned out loud at the sight of duct tape.

Only one kind of dungeon demanded that you seal your sleeves and pant legs in that way: this was a Roach Run. Bringing my bow along wasn't necessary for the crawl, but no way was I leaving lesser ironwood in my car while I was in another dimension. Other than that, it was just as gross and miserable as every other Roach Run I'd done. What did I get for enduring that discomfort? 22 XP and a bunch of Ziploc bags so I could freeze my clothing to kill any hitchhiking roaches or eggs.

The first time I did this, I didn't bring a second set of clothes, so I went home in my boxers. That was less than six months ago, but that already felt like a small lifetime. Before I started the trek home, I checked my messages. Enforcer McDouglas forwarded me a news article about George Baker:"George Baker, veteran crawler for the Furious Few and beloved community icon, pled not guilty to all charges related to accusations of attempted crasher killing.

Baker denies ever attacking or killing other crashers prior to his arrest, but in this instance, his attorney maintains that Baker and his party are protected by Pennsylvania's Castle Doctrine. Under the law, individuals are not obligated to retreat if attacked in their workplace, and Baker's defense argues that the interior of a dungeon gate was Baker's workplace. Fearing for his life, he exercised his right to protect himself and his coworkers from armed trespassers."

I sighed so hard my head tipped forward to rest on the steering wheel. That was a pretty good argument, actually. We had him on tape gloating about the prospect of murdering me and the other crashers, but taking the Stand Your Ground angle would immediately garner him a massive amount of support. I texted McDouglas.

"Is he going to get away with this?"

"Probably." Such bullshit. I risked my life several times over in that operation. While I always knew Baker walking away from this was a possibility, I hated how easy that might be for him. Depending on how this played out, he might actually open the door to more crasher killings. To pass the time on my drive home, I caught up on crawler podcasts, starting with Pal with Val, hosted by Valcuree. She was a part of The Wilds: Alaska cast and participated in the frost giant battle.

That fight actually pushed her over the hump into level 21 even though the experience was a painfully small fraction of what she would have earned killing the same monsters inside of a gate. Like most crawler influencers, she never took time away from her content schedule, so even though she was back to hiking through Alaska, she still recorded her podcast. Those episodes didn't have the studio quality of her typical productions, but I think listeners actually liked that. It was authentic.

This was a real crawler doing crawler stuff.

"We've been getting a lot of questions about this, so I think we have to address it," Valcuree began.

"The rumors are true: Myself and several crawlers I know were approached to be a part of the founding of New Eden. I knew Rick Young before this but only as a professional acquaintance. He called me personally to make the offer, which I thought was a classy touch given the scale of the effort he's leading." Rick Young was the Florida crawler who was told by God to found a new Christian nation in South America.

His "vision" came at a time when crawlers and doomers were regularly killing one another over gate rights, and the US government jumped on the opportunity to placate everyone involved. After all, doomers who followed Young to New Eden couldn't bother crawlers in the US, so the faster that move happened, the sooner the violence went away.

"I think we all had a lot of questions about how they were going to handle high-level gates, especially in the early days, and this seems to be part of the answer. I was offered a two-year contract that paid really well, if I'm being honest, and Rick also offered me a permanent position that came with property in New Eden. They'd build whatever I wanted on it, and I would serve the country as a crawler indefinitely.

"That would mean clearing gates and training new crawlers. Interestingly, they plan to make leveling mandatory for all able-bodied citizens, so every person in the country will start crawling at eighteen years old and stop when they reach level 6. I'm committed to other projects for the next five years, so I had to decline, but I'm hearing that a lot of high-level crawlers are getting this offer." The CDM once flirted with a similar idea for mandatory leveling a few decades back.

I saw the paper trail for the proposal during my brief stint as a CDM archivist, but the idea died for reasons unknown to me. Valcuree never revealed the exact specifics of the offer, but it sounded lucrative. Was Young getting all this funding from the government, or were silent backers involved? Meanwhile, schlubs like me were clearing Roach Runs all across the country for free, and the pay we got from the CDM wasn't spectacular. This story originates from Royal Road.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. But suddenly the government had budget to pay New Eden crawlers. Thinking about New Eden reminded me of my parents and all the people I knew from my old church. My dad was probably wishing this had happened thirty years earlier when he was young enough to crawl. He killed a few monsters around the farm every now and then, but he was still level 1 as far as I knew. Being that weak bothered him deeply, like a level 1 couldn't ever be a "real" man.

Picturing my mom's take on this was a little more difficult. From what little Beth and I had heard from her–which included her sitting outside Frank's shop, just watching–she seemed conflicted about leaving the two of us behind. On the one hand, the church was never wrong. On the other, we were her kids. Your children refusing to move to the promised land with you would be pretty embarrassing. And she hated being embarrassed.

If this New Eden business worked out, though, mom and dad would finally be out of our lives forever. Hopefully, the prophet crawler Rick Young kept the momentum going and the doomer exodus happened soon.

"No Milly's tonight?" I asked Beth as she flopped onto the couch in sweatpants and one of my t-shirts.

"Nope! I get an honest-to-goodness night off."

"It's been a while."

"Yeah. I'm so tired, but things are going so well with Frank. Is it weird to say that it feels like it's too good?" I shook my head.

"I think Carminos are wired to be skeptical of good news. There has to be something awful right around the corner somewhere to balance it out."

"That's exactly what I mean. Maybe that's why Jonathan died. God needed to make that balance. I wasn't allowed to be that happy." Not knowing what to say to that, I opted not to speak, keeping my eyes on a LootLootLouis livestream. His party was in the process of clearing a type of B gate casually known as "Four Seasons" because it contained a few dozen varieties of elementals.

"Is it weird I still believe in him?" Beth asked after a while.

"God?"

"I mean, logically I don't. But…"

"But you feel like he's going to come home any minute and spank the hell out of you for saying something mean to mom or not cleaning your room." Beth nodded timidly.

"I feel that way too."

"Even after being away from it for so long?"

"Six years isn't really that much time. Not when it comes to rewiring the foundation for your entire way of thinking. You don't really escape it. Not truly. You've seen already how the church suddenly inserts itself into your life out of nowhere. That never really stops."

"Oh." I reached over and squeezed Beth's shoulder.

"You're not on a deadline for figuring any of this out. You don't need to put that kind of pressure on yourself. Things are going well with Frank, though?" Beth lit up.

"He's working on a bloodwood bow for a crawler in California. It's so freaking cool." The ironwood my bow was made from came out of a dungeon gate. It was valuable, but ironwood was the most common kind of timber found in gates, and my bow was made from the lowest grade of ironwood possible. Voidwood and starwood were the rarest, with bloodwood coming in third.

"Frank hates working with bloodwood," Beth continued.

"He has to wear special gloves and a respirator so he doesn't accidentally inhale any of the sawdust. I'm not even allowed in that part of the shop. I have to look through a window."

"I've only ever read about it. What's it like seeing it in person?"

"A little creepy. The grain behaves kind of like veins. They're always pulsing like there's a heart pumping somewhere."

"I've seen some videos."

"Maybe Frank would let you come down and see." I chuckled.

"No, that's okay."

"Would you use a bloodwood bow if you could?" Beth asked.

"I'd try it, but I doubt I could ever use one full-time," I answered.

"I've never used something that drained my mana before, but it doesn't sound pleasant. Supposedly a level 5 can't hold bloodwood for longer than ten minutes without passing out."

"Frank said something similar. He doesn't think the damage boost is worth the trouble, but apparently a single bloodwood commission can pay his bills for a year."

"Sounds right. That's why I'll never have to worry about deciding whether or not to use one. At best, I get a better quality ironwood bow someday."

"I don't know," Beth replied.

"The channel seems to be going pretty well. You could end up doing okay for yourself." I wasn't so sure, and she seemed to sense my hesitancy.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Beth, those caves were the most scared I've ever been. I feel like with YouTube you have to keep topping what you did before, and that run… I don't want to do anything that scary again, let alone scarier."

"That sounds like a perfectly natural response to that situation."

"Viewers wouldn't think so," I said.

"If a crawler dies on a stream, there's always a ton of LOLs and shit talk about them being weaklings. In all the reading I did, I couldn't find examples of anyone in history willingly going into caves to fight large forces. They always try to attack from the outside instead. Humans or monsters."

"Even the well-trained soldiers?"" Especially the well-trained soldiers. There was this battle in World War II where a few thousand Japanese soldiers hid in this massive cave system to launch an ambush. The allies blew the hell out of it with artillery and then pumped gasoline and flamethrowers into the place rather than run in. And that wasn't really new. There are accounts of Romans fighting rebels in cliffside caves. They smoked them out instead of going in after them." Beth frowned.

"That's what I mean. Suffocating or poisoning a nest full of monsters isn't exciting television. Even if it was, I'm not stoked about the idea of handling that much arsenic ever again, and the 'better' options are illegal. I don't need terrorist charges for trying to blow up some goblins. And cave ambushes aren't the only problem."

"What do you mean?"

"We should have been wearing gas detectors for that run," I explained.

"All day I do these safety audits, and it's been drilled into me that enclosed spaces are surprise killers. There are all kinds of stories where one worker goes down a ladder into a pit or tunnel to do something. They pass out, so the next guy goes in to help. They go unconscious too. Four or five people can die before someone realizes that a gas might be the problem. Caves can have the same kinds of pockets."

"That sounds scarier than goblins."

"I agree. I'm good with clearing old houses or whatever, but it would take a lot of new ideas to convince me running a cave could be done safely." Beth nodded.

"I'm a fan of you staying safe. Screw what viewers think."