Chương 32: Eggs (2)

Alice's alarm went off at some crimson hour of the two random ass moons. Call it 8 AM. Nobody had a clock. The sky kept its own schedule and the schedule was vibes and bullshit. The alarm was birds. Soft little birds, and under the birds a warm rising tone that was supposedly the sound of the sun waking up, which was not a sound, the sun did not make a sound, it was a ball of fusion ninety million miles away, but the system had decided it went mmmmmm at dawn and the system had committed, fully, sincerely, wrong.

Wait. The sun probably did make a sound. Wait. Again. Did sound even work in space. Fuck. FUCK THIS. [Good morning, Alice!] [The suns are rising on a brand new day!] A little drawn sun bloomed at the edge of her panel. Purple flowers around the border. Ben lay in his bed with his eyes shut and thought, blearily, gratefully: better than Maddy's. Maddy's was a whole fucking war.

Their second morning here she'd asked the system to wake her at seven, that was the whole ask, wake me at seven, a normal thing to say to a normal alarm, and the clanker had decided waking Maddy meant an air-raid siren at full volume, every nuke alarm in the world at once, the panel strobing pink and white two inches off her face. Nobody had known it was coming. Ben had come up out of sleep with the wax knife already in his hand, swinging at nothing, eyes not done loading.

So neither Maddy nor him let Maddy run the wake-up anymore. They used Alice's. She said it was nice. So birds are nice. Yeah. Depends on the bird. Alice was already up. Twelve hours of knowing her and Ben had no idea if that was normal for her or not. She was sitting cross-legged on the end of Maddy's bed with her Stanley cup, brown hair somehow done, looking out the actual-glass window at the colored rooftops like she'd slept eleven hours in a spa.

"Morning," she whispered, because Maddy was still an engineer shape under the blanket making a low engine noise.

"I let you guys sleep. You both looked really tired. Like, really."

"We ARE really tired."

"I know. I could tell." She nodded at this. Psychologist looking nod. Filing him.

Breakfast was downstairs. John #2 worked the floor with a rag and a tankard. Why would he have a tankard while mopping the floor, well. WHO CARED. You could call him a clanker to his face and he'd thank you and top off your cup and you could also, probably, ask him to give you a shoulder massage with his shit mop and he'd do it and— Something smelled nice. There were eggs. Ben looked at the eggs.

The eggs were yellow and steaming and sat next to a heel of dark bread and Ben's whole nervous system did a small lurch, because the last egg he'd had real contact with had been one of Gerald's, raw, poured down his throat in a pink Sephora field, and it had refilled his entire HP bar in about four seconds. That egg had been a potion. That egg had qualities.

"Wait." He put his fork down.

"Are these the—""What?" Alice said.

"Are these the… healing eggs? You know, Maddy. Gerald's eggs. The HP eggs. Cause if these are the HP eggs then this breakfast costs—" he did fast panicked math, six gold and change, the silk, the room bleeding silvers every night, the talisman that wouldn't let Maddy stop spending "—this breakfast costs like fucking four golds, Maddy, we can't afford a four-gold egg, put the egg down—""It's like two coppers dude," Maddy said into the table, not opening her eyes.

"This shit isn't healing anything with that price range."

"It's two coppers, traveler," John #2 confirmed warmly, refilling something. Ben looked at John #2.

"There are magical chickens," John #2 said, "and there are ordinary chickens. The magical ones lay the eggs of restoration. These are ordinary eggs from ordinary hens. A fine breakfast egg." He said a fine breakfast egg the exact tone the dry-fish merchant had said fine quality, two days old, and something in Ben's stomach folded up small and went quiet, and he made himself not think about the dry-fish merchant, because it meant thinking about NPC Mike, and he ate the egg. It was a good egg.

There was also an AI-try-at-coffee thing. Hot, dark, bitter, came in a clay cup. Not coffee. Definitely. Coffee-shaped. Ben drank it and his lit-major brain, unkillable, supplied: was there even coffee in medieval times, and then immediately answered itself, this isn't medieval, this is nothing, this is a tavern with influencer sofas and indoor plumbing and a chicken-based potion economy, and he drank more of the not-coffee, and it was honestly pretty good.

"Okay," Maddy said, upright now, eyes open, dangerous.

"Alice. Sheet. I need to see the sheet."

"My sheet?"

"Pull your sheet. You did your whole dungeon yesterday morning and you were already in a bar crying into purple duck, so something is wildly out of pocket with your numbers and I need to see it." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Alice shrugged and did something with her hand, and her panel turned around to face them, which neither of theirs could do, because the system loved Alice and merely tolerated them.

[Alice] [Level: 14] [Class: Unselected] [HP: 150/150] [MP: 58/58] [STR: 18 | DEX: 22 | INT: 29 | WIS: 29 | CHA: 21 | LCK: A] [Skills: Triple Jet, Whirlpool, Hydro Needles, Fontaine de Jouvence] [Titles: Dungeon Soloist] Ben read it. Ben read it again.

"Level…fourteen."

"Is that a lot?" Alice said.

"It felt like a lot of little number sounds."

"Maddy's eleven. I'm nine. You did one dungeon. One." He put the not-coffee down.

"How are you level fourteen."

"I gained, like, ten levels in there? It just kept dinging. I thought everyone's did that."

"Mine does not do that."

"And your luck is a letter," Maddy said.

"That's…weird." She'd gone very still. Ben recognized the stillness. It was the engineer thing, the…intake thing she told him about, where she stopped having a face and started being a sensor. Her eyes were locked on the LCK field.

"LCK colon A," she said.

"A. Like a grade. Like a report card. Mine's a question mark. His is a question mark. Yours got grade?." She leaned in.

"Did you do anything? Did you like, fucking…sacrifice a goat or some shit. Why does the system think you're an A student in luck."

"I don't know! I never looked at that one!"

"You never looked at—""It's mean to look at your own luck," Alice said, with total conviction.

"It feels like checking if people like you." Maddy opened her mouth. Closed it. Filed that one somewhere it would never come back out.

"What's Fontaine de Joovonce," Ben said, butchering it.

"Fon- taine de Jou-vence," Alice corrected, perfect, because of course she had French, she was from fucking Montreal.

"Fountain of Youth. I drink from my cup and it heals me. Refills every hour."

"The system named your water bottle the Fountain of Youth," Ben said.

"In French."

"It named my Thunderbolt Thunderbolt," Maddy said.

"No wait. I did that. But like. It named her cup the Fountain of Youth in fucking French. It put a French restaurant menu in a fantasy game. This thing has no taste. None. Zero taste."

"I think it's kind of pretty," Alice said.

"It's not pretty, it's pretentious. It's the system reaching for the thesaurus to seem deep. It's—" Ben heard himself getting loud about it and reeled it in, because he was describing his own one-star review of a book, and the book had turned out to have a real address. He drank the not-coffee.

"Triple Jet," Maddy read off the sheet, all business.

"Three water spears, nearest enemy, doesn't miss, four mana each. Whirlpool, twenty mana, turns the whole area into a whirlpool, can affect friends. Can…uh. Write that down, don't friendly-fire us in a cave. Hydro Needles, tiny lances, half a mana each, no aim assist." She looked up.

"That's a kit. That's a real kit. You've got a no-miss opener, an oh-shit button, and a spam attack. Why are you better built than both of us combined."

"And then there's the title," Ben said.

"Dungeon Soloist," Maddy read. She read the rest of it off the tooltip and went quiet again.

"'One hundred percent regeneration of all stats and mana while clearing a dungeon solo.'""Yeah! That's why it was easy! Every time I got tired I just—" Alice mimed topping up.

"—full again."

"This happened after you cleared it. Clearly," Ben said.

"You were already busted from the start."

"Oh really?"

"While solo," Maddy said. Slowly. The sensor had found something.

"You're a god while solo. The second you're in there with us, you're in a party of three, and the title doesn't apply. No regen. You're just a level-fourteen water mage with a fifty-eight mana bar like a normal busted person." She sat back.

"So we can't lean on it. The thing that makes you broken turns off the moment we walk in with you."

"Oh." Alice frowned at her own panel like it had betrayed her.

"That's kind of sad. For the title."

"And you're Class: Unselected," Ben added, because it had been bugging him.

"You're level fourteen and you never picked a class. Maddy and I had to clear a whole dungeon to unlock a hidden class and you just—what, skipped the menu?"

"There was a menu?"

"Urgh," Maddy said, to no one.

"This is so cringe. We sound insane. We're three dead people in a fantasy bar interrogating a girl about her luck grade."

"I think yours is kind of cool, though," Alice offered.

"Like a mystery."

"It's not a mystery, it's shit design," Ben and Maddy said, more or less together, and then looked at each other, faintly disturbed. They continued to eat the stupid eggs. The eggs were good.

They needed the dungeon. They needed to know where the dungeon was.

"System," Ben said, out loud, to the air, which he'd sworn he would never do again, which told a lot about his convictions.

"Hey. Clanker. The Hollow Weaves. Where is it. Directions. Go." His panel slid in, prompt, helpful, the helpfulness somehow worse than refusal. [Trail of Eldarion—MAJOR QUEST] [Hollow Webs Dungeon—Find Sylvael!] [Sparkle] Ben stared at it.

"It's Weaves, dude" he said.

"Sylvael said the Hollow Weaves. This says Webs. Pick one. Pick a name, it's your dungeon, you fucking made it, you can't even keep the noun straight in a quest you generated for me, in real time, while I'm standing here—""Ben," Maddy said.

"Chill out dude. It's dumb. Probably hallucinated or some shit."

"—and 'find Sylvael,' don't tell me to find Sylvael, you literally just drew Maddy a glittering pink GPS line to a fucking panties store, you know where every cobblestone in this city is, you know exactly where the dungeon is, you put it on a quest list. JUST GIVE ME THE FUCKING LOCATION YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT." [Guilds often know the locations of official dungeons! Why not ask Sylvael?] [Sparkle]"YOU KNOW IT TOO. WE KNOW YOU KNOW. WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME WALK BACK TO THE ELF."

"Let's just go find Sylvael, Ben," Alice said gently, already standing, cup in hand.

"It's a nice walk. We can…look at the buildings." Ben looked at her. He exhaled loudly. Maybe he was too impatient.

"…yeah. Let's do that."

Sylvael was at the counter. Sylvael was always at the counter. Ben was starting to suspect Sylvael did not have a back room, that the system rendered her only as a front, a counter and a deputy and two violet eyes and massive tits and nothing behind. She gave them a map. It was a real map, old paper, soft at the folds, with little hand-drawn marks and place-names in a script that the system wanted very badly to feel ancient: Sorrowmoor. The Ribwood. Hollow Weaves. Weaves. Sylvael's map said Weaves.

The system's quest said Webs. Two official sources, one dungeon, two nouns. Ben's eye twitched. He took the map outside, held it up, and asked the system to scan it.

"Scan the map. Read the map. Overlay the route. You do directions, you did the silk store, do the map." [Follow the map, Ben!] [Sparkle]"FOLLOW THE—" Maddy laughed. Actually laughed, an ugly bark of one, and then Alice caught it off her and laughed too, the pair of them folding into each other on the guild steps, and Ben stood there holding a piece of paper a clanker had refused to read while two girls lost it at his expense, and the worst part, the genuinely worst part, was that it was a little funny.

"It's not funny."

"It's so funny," Maddy said.

"It told you to follow the map," Alice wheezed.

"It's so polite. Follow the map, Ben."

"I hate it here."

"No you don't," Maddy said, wiping her eye, and started walking.

"Wait. No. You do. We both do. But it's still funny."

"Fuck you."

"Shut up, Ben. Start walking."

"I can't read a map."

"Lit major that can't read. Great antithesis." Ben smiled. He tried not to. But it was funny. So he smiled.

"Alright," Alice said.

"Follow me. I'm good with maps."

"Really?" Maddy said.

"How come?" Alice smiled a little.

"I'm not. I thought it'd brighten the mood. Stay positive and all."

"This does NOT brighten my mood," Ben said.

"Shut UP, Ben. Follow our new party leader."

"…okay." They started moving forward.