Chương 91: 89: Dogs, That’s How

After saying good-bye to Betsy, waving to the kids, and promising again to take very good care of Lola, the dogs and I rejoined Jack at the end of Betsy's driveway. He'd amassed a small collection of rat loot while I'd been talking to Betsy. I might have been sanguine about the teenagers scavenging, but he was muttering about ninjas as he passed me a worn-out watch, a tiny compass that looked like it came out of a cereal box, a ball of twine, a sewing kit, two buttons, and a walnut.

"A walnut? Seriously?" I held it up, holding it between thumb and index finger. He shrugged.

"It might be good."

"Or it might be a walnut." I tapped [Analyze]. It was a walnut. The watch was a watch; the compass was a compass; the ball of twine was… you get the picture. Any of it might come in handy—you never know when you're going to need to sew a button on your pants—but none of it was worth our time. I stuck it all in my pockets anyway, since I was the only one of us with handy-dandy spatial storage pockets.

Missy and David had both been talking to other neighbors, exchanging news and gossip like bystanders at any normal disaster scene.

"Ready to go?" I checked in with them, offered my best friendly-but-not-interested-in-chatting smile to the other neighbors, and herded my expanded pack down the rat debris field. My vague plan had been to wander around the neighborhood looking for monsters or other mana-crazed animals. I knew with the giant rat mischief gone that we might have to search, but I figured Bear would help out with that. With the addition of Lola to our pack, I was rethinking. I wanted us to kill a lot of monsters. Fast.

I wanted Lola to get as many levels as possible and to a lesser extent I wanted the same for Missy and David. We needed a rift. The closest one was N7W12S#731, the one I'd come through to get here. The dark, hot, sweltering cave. The fire elemental had probably come from it, and taking my beginners to level up against fire elementals felt like a terrible idea. My beginners. I mentally scoffed at myself.

And then I thought about finding the next closest rift and my intuition, aka my jacket, obligingly pointed the way.

"This way," I said, before leading us down the bloody street. Rifts were spaced a few miles apart, as best as I could judge from the pins on my RMI map, so it might be a long walk. But that was okay. If we found monsters on the way, maybe we wouldn't need the rift at all.

"Are we heading to the park?" David asked.

"Are you thinking there'll be more animals there?" A logical deduction. Not right, though.

"Something like that," I said, watching the road. I really hadn't decided what to tell them about rifts. It wasn't as if they were some big secret. I maybe knew a little more than most, but the more the information spread, the better off the world would be. People needed to clear the rifts before they overflowed. But I didn't like Bryce. And that was honestly a stupid reason not to share what I knew with David and Missy.

"We're heading toward a rift," I said.

"It might be the one the rats came out of."

"The rats came out of a what?" David spoke first.

"You know about the rifts that have opened, right?" I asked, surprised by his response.

"Of course," David replied.

"But I thought they were…" He hesitated, looking uncomfortable.

"Magic?" Jack said, his voice as dry as sandpaper.

"Yeah." David stopped talking. I looked between them. I had no idea what that was about, so I was going to file it in the None of My Business category and move on with my explanation.

"Some of those rats might have been Earth rats, crazed by mana, but there were so many of them, it's more likely that they came out of a rift. Rifts can contain anything you can imagine. Anything the rift core can create with mana," I explained.

"Rifts, sorta by definition, have two gates, one that connects to Earth, one that connects to another planet. And the contents of the rift have some relationship to either of those planets. Maybe Earth scenery, alien planet creatures, maybe vice versa. Maybe it tilts heavily toward one planet. Or not. The rift contents are unpredictable, but there's no reason it can't contain creatures from Earth. Or Earth-like creatures, I suppose."

Every member of the Francis family had their eyes locked on my face, so I flushed a little.

"Sorry for the lecture."

"How the fuck do you know this?" Jack squawked at me, and then he glanced at his mom, and added, "Language, I know, sorry." She shook her head and said, "You know, if there's ever been a good time to say 'fuck', it's now. Feel free." She finished with a laugh that was a giggle. A borderline hysterical giggle.

"Ah, yeah, so, when I refused the enclave, the System gave me a rift. And it came with, um, instructions? Of a sort, anyway," I explained to Jack. He put his hands together and made a funny little bow.

"The student has surpassed the master," he intoned in a sepulchral voice.

"What are you talking about?" David asked. Jack pointed at me.

"Olivia didn't know what the System was last week. She didn't take her class or her levels when they were offered. And she grumbled—mightily—about the unreasonableness of the whole thing. She called it creepy Santa Claus." Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Wow, that felt like a long time ago. A really long time. My smile was crooked as I added, "Jack taught me everything I know. I wouldn't have made it through the scenario without him." Jack snorted.

"Yeah, right. As I remember it, I would have died in the first hour without you."

"Died?" Missy's eyes went wide.

"Gotten kicked out," Jack said hastily.

"Kicked out, that's all. No one actually died in our scenario. Although I heard there were tougher ones."

"Seeing you and Emma go was awful," I told him.

"That acid…" I shuddered.

"Yeah, don't remind me." He shuddered, too.

"Three near misses so far, I'm hoping I start doing better."

"Near miss is as good as a win, I figure. If you get to walk away, you're ahead of the game."

"Have you heard anything about the death rate yet?" Jack glanced at his mom and corrected himself, "The survival rate, I mean." I shook my head, and we all fell silent and just walked for a while. I kept my eyes on the dogs. All four of them were strolling along at our pace, peacefully enough that I knew there were no monsters nearby. Our conversation had made Jack's parents nervous, though, their heads swiveling at every sound, jumping at every stray motion.

"The dogs will know if there's danger long before we will," I finally said.

"You can relax, just keep an eye on them."

"From the news, I was expecting deranged animals around every corner," Missy admitted.

"If we'd come out when the rats were swarming…" David muttered.

"You would have died," Jack said. I shot him a look. It was the 'magic' voice again. Not hostile, but the words sounded unkind in a way that didn't seem typical of him.

"I'm sorry," his father said abruptly.

"You were right, I was wrong, and I should have listened to you." Jack stopped walking, his eyes going wide, and his father gave him the kind of gentle punch to the shoulder that sports guys do.

"Um, yeah, okay. Cool." Jack looked like a guy who'd just won the lottery and was trying not to let anyone know. Gratified on a level that should have required a lot more than a two-sentence apology. My eyes met Missy's and we shared a look that probably expressed just as much as that shoulder punch, although it was more along the lines of, "Boys. Whatever."

It took another long stretch of walking before we got to the rift gate, and we stayed quiet along the way, in part because the damage got more and more extensive the closer to the rift we got. In the same way that the area nearest to the fire elemental rift had taken the most damage, with burned-out cars and blackened houses surrounding the area, the property near this rift had been devastated by the rats. Gardens and yards were gone, stripped to bare dirt and churned up.

Homes had been gnawed, door frames chewed, insulation pulled out. And the skeletons… well. They didn't all belong to wild animals. We wouldn't have found the gate if it weren't for my jacket. It was inside a house, in a living room that no one would ever live in again. I hoped the owners had been at work when the rift opened, but even if they had, if they were the ones who opened the door… It wasn't a thought I wanted to examine. But I felt honestly fine about slaughtering rats now.

I was okay with killing them all. At the shimmer, I turned to face the crowd behind me. Four dogs, four people. I didn't know if rift instances had occupant limits like elevators, but it was possible.

"Rifts are instanced," I said, and when Missy looked just as blank as I had the first time I heard the word, I added, "Multiple versions of the rift can exist simultaneously if people enter it at different times. You don't run into people in the rift unless you entered with them. I'm not sure how many people are allowed, so we're going to make sure to enter as teams. Jack, you and your dad, with Bear and Riley, I hope; then your mom and me with Lola and Zelda.

Hopefully we'll all be in the same instance and this is just me being cautious, but just in case, I want the levels to be as balanced as possible." Jack slapped a hand to his heart.

"You became a power gamer while I was lying in bed, recovering." I snorted.

"Not a game, Jack," his mother muttered, her hands tight on the poker again.

"Yes, fair point," he conceded immediately.

"You're gonna be fine, Mom. This is gonna be easy." She nodded, swallowed hard.

"Okay," I said, brisk and efficient.

"Let's do it." The rift turned out to be a sewer tunnel, with puddles of sludge on the ground and a stench reminiscent of a septic system. Sadly, while the smell was unpleasant, it wasn't actually as bad as the smell of death around #731. I mean, I guess that was good news? But it kind of sucked that sewage wasn't the worst thing I'd smelled today. And, of course, it was the perfect and obvious environment for rats. We'd all made it in, so there were eight of us strolling through rat heaven.

Okay, maybe rat hell, because even though David, Missy, and Lola were our primary fighters, we massacred rats like they were ants at a picnic, with extreme prejudice and in vast numbers. Missy got her first level within ten minutes or so, and got to choose her class. I didn't feel like I'd actually given her much in the way of advice, but I guess power-leveling counted because she did get the A Brush with Greatness achievement. It was the first time Jack heard about it.

He turned into a broken record, the kind that Danny had never heard. It was "What the fuck, what the fuck," on a loop.

"Dude, I know," I finally said.

"But… but… but…"

"Somebody needs to give you elocution lessons," I muttered. Riley, apparently having his own opinion about our current delay, lifted his leg and marked the sewer wall.

"You are the highest level person on the planet?" David repeated.

"Discretion advised," I told him.

"It says so, right there in the achievement."

"It does." Missy nodded, although her eyes were glazed as she read her HUD.

"How is that even possible?" David asked. He looked me up and down, not in a salacious way, just mystified. I smiled at him, remembering when he'd opened their front door for me. He'd assumed I was harmless and more likely to be in trouble than to be trouble, because… well, call it pretty privilege.

"Dogs," I told him, gesturing at my pack.

"That's how."

"Told 'ya," Missy said without breaking out of her focus on her HUD.

"We should have gotten a dog years ago." David shook his head, still bemused.

"All right," Missy announced.

"I'm going to be a mage. A water mage."

"If you hold off, you might get a better option later," I suggested. I was a little surprised and a little relieved that she hadn't been offered some "Thorn" class to go with the achievement. Maybe the classes Danny, Katie, and Pen had been offered had nothing to do with me. And maybe pigs fly. They might in the magical multiverse. She shook her head.

"I'm good with this. It might not be the best fighting class, but everyone's going to be wanting clean water soon. This little water spray spell's gonna be the shower we're all looking for. And you guys will just have to keep me safe along the way." She beamed at her son and husband. Some more rats appeared out of the shadows, and we got back to work. Well, I use the term "we" loosely. I was just walking. And it was getting kind of boring.

Missy practiced her spells; David borrowed her poker and practiced his swings; Lola efficiently crunched rat spines. Every once in a while, a pack would have a few extra rats or an extra big one and Zelda would get to play, but mostly it was tedious. Jack and I chatted quietly in the back about everything I'd been doing over the past few days; Emma's enclave, my home rift, JJ and Alma, meeting Ellie.

I avoided a few subjects, because I didn't want his parents to overhear: no need to explain the Barrows or San Celeste. We walked. Some rats were killed. We walked some more. More rats were killed. It started to feel less like a rift and more like an unpleasant treadmill, although both Missy and David reached Level 4 and Lola hit Level 5. It was Jack who said it first.

"Are we walking in circles?" I stopped walking and looked around me. It looked familiar, but one sewer tunnel looks a lot like the next. I looked at the dogs.

"Have we been walking in a circle?" All four of them looked at me like, 'Duh?' Lola nosed a spot on the wall. Riley leave mark. Zelda agreed. We walk past… And then she sat and scratched her ear. Lots of times. Riley sat down next to his own mark, in clear agreement, then sighed and lay down. I wait here? And no, I hadn't realized it was a loop until that moment. In my defense, it was a sewer tunnel. It looked… yeah, okay, I have no defense, it was just stupid.