Chương 70: CDM 2, Chapter 6: Referral

Enforcer Cortez and I crossed paths in the parking garage the next morning.

"Ready for another thrilling day of RAID babysitting?" he asked.

"Maybe we'll see something interesting."

"The team last night busted a group of crashers."

"No shit?"

"Yeah, but that's a few mouse clicks, maybe some typing, and then you're back to staring at monitors." I shrugged.

"It's a job."

"That it is. That it is." We didn't talk much more on our way up to the RAID command center. With a full shift ahead, we both used the small reprieve of an elevator ride to scroll around on our phones a little bit. On a night shift, I was brave enough to check messages, but no way was I getting busted by Enforcer Chapman for looking at Reddit during a normal workday. When I got to my desk, I found Enforcer McDouglas sitting in my chair. He wore a creamsicle orange polo shirt.

"Only need a minute," he said.

"Conference room?"

"Sure." Cortez gave me a weird look but didn't say anything when McDouglas and I went into the conference room and shut the door. One of the walls was all glass, so anyone in the RAID room could see us speaking, but they couldn't hear us.

"Wanted to make sure the news about Baker didn't mess with your head too much," McDouglas said.

"I mean, it sucks. I'm not really surprised, though."

"It's good to be a pessimist in this business. I was worried it blindsided you." I shook my head.

"I'm good."

"How's Beth doing? I've run into her at Milly's, but she seems like the type to put on a brave face."

"I hear her crying at night sometimes," I replied.

"She's hurting a lot, but she hasn't given up trying to build her life."

"She said she got an apprenticeship at Steel Town Bow & Arrow."

"Yeah. Seems to like it."

"Frank's a crazy bastard, but he's really good at what he does."

"You know him?" McDouglas nodded.

"His family is one of the big ones in the Buttymen. They had a falling out somewhere along the way, but don't let the old guy persona fool you. He's a level 23 spellbow."

"For real? I thought he came from a family of gunsmiths."

"That's technically true. Like it is with anything else, the actual story is more complicated than a soundbite. Anyway, if Beth got Frank to like her, she's on a good track. That might be something to keep in your pocket for when she needs encouragement." I nodded.

"Sure."

"Well, I don't need Chapman mad at me too, so I won't keep you." McDouglas moved to the door.

"Just wanted to check in. See you around, Gray." I didn't immediately leave the room when McDouglas did. Frank was a motherfucking level 23 spellbow? Holy shit. He was born into a Buttymen family, which is why he still got to level despite starting with a martial class, such were the advantages of guild nepotism. I wondered what his build looked like. What builds were even popular twenty or thirty years ago when he was active?

The old school spellbow build was 10 levels of archer and then as many levels of mage as you could manage. Kenny "the Cannon," the spellbow from Montreal who fought in the frost giant battle, was a spellbow, but only 5 of his overall levels were black mage. The rest of his levels were a power archer build. That approach was somewhat controversial because more levels in mage were as versatile as they were effective, so capping his at 5 raised a few eyebrows. But it was hard to argue with the results.

For someone like Frank, who made bowyering his life's work, I had a hard time imagining him stopping at 10 levels of archer. When I sat at my desk, Cortez stood to lean over my cubicle.

"You're chummy with Enforcer McDouglas?"

"I don't think he'd call it 'chummy.'" Cortez laughed.

"The guy I trained under said to get in with McDouglas if I could. Apparently, he knows everyone, and they like him too."

"You heard that in Nevada?"

"Yep. So, you're going to introduce me, right?"

"If you're expecting me to have any kind of cred, don't get your hopes up," I said. After a long, suspicious stare, Cortez nodded and ducked back down to sit at his desk. Was I that terrible of a liar? How did one get good at lying? Cortez seemed to clock my deflection pretty much immediately. More interestingly, McDouglas had a reputation on the west coast too? I'd already gathered that he was more than a typical enforcer.

I knew that the moment he showed up in the archival room to confiscate the Unsung Heroes documents. He had the clearance, and he was the one to get the ping. Of all the people in the building who could have addressed an intern seeing the wrong files, McDouglas was the one who appeared. And it was near instantaneous. Was he personally in the Unsung Heroes? Was his work adjacent to or related to the Unsung Heroes? What had McDouglas done for "everyone" to know who he was?

My work for the day pushed those questions out of my mind. In between double-checking drone feeds, I had reports to finalize from harvest inspections earlier in the week. Soon, the tedium was all I could think about.

"We're both off Sunday. Go hunting that day?" Megan was anxious to get another video up on the channel, and I couldn't blame her. Our work with RAID, however, made our schedules far more challenging to coordinate. I very much preferred hunting on Saturday and keeping Sunday as a true day off, but that wasn't going to be an option again for a long time.

"Yeah. Maybe we can find something close-ish." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"And small. Ask your crystal ball to point you to a nest with 10-20 goblins, please."

"lol" My method for finding monster nests, what Megan called my crystal ball, was really just public EPA satellite data. They labeled suspected monster locations as "Sites of Concern" but provided no other details. Sometimes that meant fighting goblins, but it also led to us fighting a giant water moccasin and two nasty trolls. With SOCs, we didn't know what we were in for until we were fighting it. I don't know why I still kept the method a secret from Megan. At this point, I trusted her completely.

We grew close relatively quickly with all of the long car rides and intense combat experiences we had together. The Dungeon Divas YouTube channel basically made us business partners as well. Nathan was absolutely smitten by her, romantically speaking, so she was pretty close to being what I considered family on that front too. After my brief stint undercover, however, I found myself increasingly hesitant about sharing anything that felt remotely proprietary.

I didn't need to worry about revealing the wrong thing if I didn't reveal anything at all. I wanted the opposite for my life. I would have really liked to have someone to talk to about what I experienced crashing. That was the first time when I knew, without a doubt, that the person standing in front of me intended to kill me. That same person could end up walking free if the Castle Doctrine defense worked, meaning he would be back out in the world somewhere. How was I supposed to live with that?

"I was thinking we could use flashbangs if we had to run caves. There are legal versions of those, but they're loud AF. No sneaking around once you set one of those off."

"And we wouldn't have a good idea of when to use them. I don't think we'll have cave maps that good ever again."

"True true." Megan didn't say it outright, but she was as freaked out by the Chestnut Ridge run as I was. That nest was a reality check in half a dozen different ways, and I felt a little bit better knowing I wasn't alone in those feelings. The AI privacy detection was a mess that day, by the way. The dev team in DC pushed a patch the night before, and suddenly RAID struggled to identify houses, which were supposed to be blacked out to protect civilians. The problem? Metal rooftops.

Anything with shingles got flagged accurately, but for some reason, this version of the software no longer believed that people lived under metal roofs. But whatever. Otherwise, we did our routine checks, like switching every drone into and out of thermal mode and making sure we interacted with them enough that they counted as "active" surveillance instead of passive. Thermal mode. Huh. If I could see the heat signatures of monsters, exploring a cave wouldn't be as dangerous.

Civilians could buy drones equipped with thermal and night vision, but the quality hardware started at around $10, 000 and went up from what I found. Flying a drone in a cave was already a risky proposition, but watching $10, 000 break into pieces because a propeller bumped a rock I didn't see would be brutal. It might not sound like a lot to some people, but $10, 000 was a life-changing amount of money for me.

I could pay a lot of bills with that much cash or do something crazy like make a down payment on a car or pay off a credit card. Thermal vision goggles weren't much better in terms of price, unfortunately. I didn't know if this was true or not because I had never actually held a pair of thermal vision goggles, but they looked fragile. What were the chances they could survive a direct hit from a club or hunk of brick? Geez. How would I wear them with a helmet?

All of the pictures were of guys in military gear with their eyes exposed. My helmet covered my whole face. That night over dinner, I asked Nathan what he knew about thermal vision. That sounded like something he would have read about at some point just because he was curious. Megan had a RAID night shift, and Beth was at work, so they wouldn't be weighing in.

"I assume we're talking for crawling?" he asked in return.

"Yes." He set down his burger and wiped his hands, thinking as he chewed.

"Thermal only works with contrast, so the closer the ambient temperature gets to whatever you're tracking, the less effective it is. I gotta imagine caves wouldn't be bad in general. At a certain depth, they have a level temperature, right?"

"That's what I read."

"Yeah, bro, that works in your favor then. A little bit of moisture will fuck you up, though."

"Really?"

"Oh, for sure. If it's humid or something like that, the water becomes like static. Interferes with the sensor."

"That makes sense," I said.

"If you're going shopping for toys like that, I want to come." I laughed.

"I don't know, man. That gear is pretty far out of our price range."

"Even with YouTube money?"

"Even with YouTube money."

"Searching for traps might be a pain with thermal," Nathan added.

"You won't be able to see shit when you're in thermal mode. If it isn't warm, it isn't showing up. Traps. Holes. Walls. None of that."

"Jesus. I didn't even think about that part." That meant neither Megan nor I could use thermal nonstop. As the frontliner, it made more sense for her to use thermal because she would always spot something before I did, but she also needed to step carefully.

"That's why you got me to be your Zordon."

"Zordon?" Nathan sighed.

"It's a Power Rangers reference. I'm guessing that was too violent for you to watch as a kid?"

"Definitely."

"Zordon was like the brains of the operation. He hung out in his little tube while the Power Rangers went out fighting."

"Gotcha. Sure, you can be Zordon."

"Nope," he protested.

"You're not giving that proclamation the gravity it deserves. That's like getting a Medal of Honor from someone who thinks it's just a pin."

"Sorry."

"Anyway, I get why you'd want thermal vision. It would still be useful, but you'd have to stop, flip it on, look around, and then flip it off so you can move again. Not the worst thing in the world. What's a goblin's average body temperature anyway?" I thought for a moment.

"I don't know that I've ever read anything about their body temperature."

"Take a thermometer on the next hunt then. I'm sure they'd let you put it under the tongue and check."

"Har har." Nathan grinned.

"Real talk, you can get a handheld thermal scanner. We use them at work sometimes."

"Thank you for your help."

"I'm always here for morphin' time. No, forget I said that. Explaining it will just make me sad." Nathan blew up my phone with texts overnight. I didn't read them until the next morning. Showing you the transcript is probably easiest: Dude I don't think you looked very hard for drones This one they straight up throw into caves Like a football Ok nm it's $150k But bro there are options. Mini ones too This one has a cage so it bounces off of walls And AI navigation with lidar.

Idk if that's bs because everything has AI something or whatever the fuck $7k is better than $150k I assume that's $7k for the whole thing and not just the cage Maybe beth can get them to sponsor you Oh shit there are ground ones too, like RC cars They're cool but I think we should stick with the flying ones this is solvable man. Like totally. You don't wanna be going into anything too tight anyway.

If the drone can't fit then hell no you don't go Bro bro bro Let me fly it Like on hunts Idk how we deal with the signal loss bc no way am I going in. Like they get a signal out of dungeon gates so there's gotta be a way to get one out of caves Don't tell Megan anything yet. Let me think about this before I let you recruit me But dude viewers will love a robot bro following you around No it should be a girl robot because you're dungeon divas Same outcome tho.

The kids will love it WTF man why did you keep me up so late I have to work tomorrow Asshole