Decisions are hard. This is a fact. Some people, of course, insist that decisions are easy, but these people tend to make very bad ones, such as "Let's poke the sleeping bear" or "I'm sure this milk is still fine."
It was especially hard when one was confronted with a System that cataloged everything from Speedy Gift Wrapping to Floss With TP! (which was probably a skill with fewer practical applications than one might hope). And so, Annabel Smith was delighted—nay, ecstatic—to discover the Random Roll option, lurking in the corner of the hovering screen like a guilty afterthought.
ROLL FOR SKILL
Feeling the existential dread of making an irreversible choice? No worries, we’ve got you covered!
Gain a random skill from our list of 168,943 × 101? options! To make up for the fact that you will have—
(At this point, the text became very small and suspiciously apologetic.)
—no control whatsoever over the outcome, nor any rights to refunds, exchanges, or strongly worded complaints—in the spirit of fairness and fun, we offer you the thrilling possibility of a FREE BONUS.
By rolling for your skill (which, let’s be honest, is much more exciting than picking something sensible), you have:
- A 25% chance that your skill will be upgraded one tier!
- A 12.5% chance that it will be upgraded two tiers!
- A 6.25% chance that it will be utterly, completely, and hilariously useless!
- A 3.125% chance that it will arrive with a complimentary box of chocolates!*
*Chocolates not guaranteed to be edible. May contain nuts, eldritch horrors, or traces of contractual loopholes…
Annabell, whose enthusiasm for reading fine print was approximately equal to her enthusiasm for thinking about life-altering choices, pressed the button without further ado.
CHAOS ROLL BONUS, ACTIVATED! (Now with even more randomness!)
A familiar roulette wheel materialized in the air, spinning merrily while its jaunty jingle played.
"As long as it comes with chocolate, anything is good, isn’t it?" Annabel mused, shoveling another handful of dry cereal into her mouth.
She had barely swallowed when the screen before her erupted in celebratory fireworks.
CONGRATULATIONS!
NEW SKILL OBTAINED:
Oh, Wait, Now I Remember Where I Put The Keys (Tier: Bronze)
SKILL UPGRADED TO HIGHER TIER:
Oh, Wait, Now I Remember Where I Put The Keys has evolved into…
SURGE OF INSPIRATION! (Tier: Silver)
Spin a bottle and follow it to greatness!
Below, her status screen had been updated:
Name: Annabel Smith
Class: Gremlin (Level 2)
Active Skills:
- Shiny Acquisition (Chaotic)
- Emergency Escape (Cartwheel Variant)
- Surge of Inspiration! (New! Now with 27% more questionable decision-making!)
Passive Abilities:
- Questionable Logic (+1 range to chaos rolls, -1 to sanity checks)
- A Child’s Palate (Random boons from junk food, random banes from anything suspiciously green)
Social Bonus:
- Mischief Approved (+10 to confusing others, -5 to being taken seriously)
Core Stats (Chaotic):
- Might: 3 (2-4)
- Dexterity: 3 (2-4)
- Endurance: 2 (1-2)
- Intellect: 3 (1-5)
- Charisma: 2 (1-3)
- Unspent Points: 2
Active Gremlin Factor: Wild Card! (Chaos rolls on stat checks, because of course they do.)
Annabel’s eyes narrowed with the keen suspicion of someone who had been promised a free gift but had yet to see the merchandise.
“And my chocolates?” she asked, her tone hovering somewhere between coaxing and thinly veiled threat.
The screen remained obstinately silent.
She threw up her arms. “The game is rigged! Open your eyes, Sheeple! The House is nothing but a bunch of tight-fisted, candy-hoarding con-artists!”
Despite her tantrum, no outraged manager appeared to offer her so much as a conciliatory cough drop. The System, in its infinite wisdom, did not seem to employ customer service.
With a huff, she flung the empty cereal box aside and rolled over, heading straight for the bed’s pillow.
Before she completely passed out, in a fit of inspired pragmatism (or perhaps just sugar-induced logic), she’d shoved her handful of zombie teeth underneath it. The idea had been simple: pillow + offering = magically transmogrified treasure. If the Tooth Fairy could make a business model out of this, then surely the System could manage some kind of exchange rate.
She lifted the pillow expectantly.
The teeth were still there, unchanged. And, sitting right beside them…
A handgun?
LOOT AVAILABLE
- 5 Zombie Teeth (Slightly warm, but unlikely to hatch into anything useful.)
- 1 Schmock 45 (It seems Rotting Phil has some explaining to do… If he wasn’t dead!)
Annabel let out a deep sigh and picked up the gun with her fingertips.
“You fail on all points, Phil,” she said, turning it over with the delicate distaste of someone handling an overripe banana. “Everyone knows secret stashes are exclusively for snacks. What am I supposed to do with this? Shoot someone?”
Shaking her head, Annabell promptly discarded the pistol into the wastebasket beside the bed and retrieved the zombie teeth instead, letting them clatter into her pouch. Those might come in handy.
She stretched, joints popping in protest, and flopped back onto the mattress with a satisfied groan. “Right, then. What to do?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
On a normal day, Annabell would have been perfectly content to lounge in bed after waking up, scrolling through her phone, lost in the warm embrace of mindless entertainment. But with the WiFi connection officially deceased, that particular joy was no longer an option.
Just lying here, staring at the ceiling? Well. That was a fast track to either existential dread or decay in her mental facilities, and Annabell was already working with limited resources.
She sighed. “I suppose the hunt for shinies and snacks continues?”
Her reason for coming to Rotting Phil’s apartment—before she got distracted by snacks, naps, and epic battles—was a search of a plan. A brilliant, cunning, entirely foolproof plan for dealing with the shambling, groaning, probably-very-upset undead horde currently milling about outside the apartment complex.
Safe Zone Invasion Imminent
Time Remaining: 09:24:07…
Now, as she swung her legs over the side of the bed—tippy-toes hovering just above the trashcan where an empty bottle of cough syrup and the Schmock 45 now lay waiting, fully loaded, ready to be used—Annabell smacked herself in the forehead.
“Of course!”
The answer was right there.
***
Surge of Inspiration — Cooldown: 01:58:32…
“Alright, Wallace,” Annabell declared, standing in the doorway of Rotting Phil’s apartment. The empty bottle of cough syrup lay at her feet, thoroughly spun, and now pointing straight at the front door. “I want to see this thing off its hinges. Preferably no stubbed toes along the way.”
The plan was, in many ways, elegantly simple.
Having already taken out two mighty foes by dropping heavy objects on them, why stop now?
Such was the wisdom Annabell had found at the bottom of the cough-syrup bottle. “It’s a winning strategy! A proven technique!” it seemed to say. “And rather than haul a cumbersome piece of furniture all the way out of the apartment, why not just pop this door off its frame and hurl that outside?”
The brilliance of the solution astonished even her.
Now, Annabell crouched down, wiggling her fingers under the door frame. “I’m gonna need you to use your knees for this, Wallace. Or, better yet, just keep it steady, and I’ll do the heavy lifting, okay?”
Wallace, being a stuffed bulldog, remained unhelpfully silent. But that was fine. Annabell had already put her two stat points from leveling into Might*, and she’d gained an extra one from the boon of the Crunchy Waste-Fuel she’d hurriedly fetched from her room for an extra boost of sugary confidence. With a whopping 6 points in Might, she was ready.
*(Annabel originally planned to put her hard-earned points into Charisma, purely for the noble purpose of making her cartwheels even more dashing. But then she’d had a revelation, the kind that only comes to true visionaries and people who eat too much junk-food before bed: Wouldn’t it be so much cooler to cartwheel down hallways at twice the velocity? And so, in a decision that would one day cause great concern for health and safety officials, she had chosen Might.)
Might Check…
Critical Success!
Now, with a single reckless jerk—the sort that belonged more to Olympic hammer-throwers than to anyone performing a delicate moving operation—Annabell yanked the door clean off its hinges.
It was at this point that Wallace, who was technically a mere plushie and therefore bore no legal responsibility for anything, failed to stop the heavy slab of wood from flipping over like a badly managed pancake. It slammed into the floor with a THUNK that suggested it had just learned about gravity the hard way.
“You could at least have tried to catch it,” Annabel huffed, glaring down at her cotton-stuffed companion.
Wallace said nothing.
“Oh, what’s that?” Annabel continued, hands on hips. “You mean to say this is my fault? Well, excuse me for upgrading these guns to lethal weapons.”
She flexed her scrawny arms with great satisfaction.
Then, throwing her head back, she let out one of her signature laughs—cackling, unhinged, and the kind of noise that made people instinctively check for nearby exits.
“Yes, that’s right. I’m no longer just Lady Coin-Flip! From this day onward, the world shall know me as—” she struck a dramatic pose—“Lady Coin-and-Door-Flip!”
She hummed a jolly little tune as she bent down, placed both hands on the fallen door, and began shoving it down the hallway like a particularly flat, deeply unimpressed bobsled. At increasing speeds.
Straight towards a wall she had no way of seeing, being busy staring at her own hands for some reason.
Had Wallace been a good friend, he might have called out a warning. But Wallace was a stuffed bulldog. More importantly, Wallace was spiteful. And if Annabel was determined to learn about momentum the hard way, well, who was he to intervene?
***
For any undead loitering about that day—whether they had pressing business in the area or were simply engaging in the time-honored zombie tradition of standing around and moaning—the entrance of Apartment Complex 4C, South Block had become the place to be.
Word had spread, in the way that things tend to spread among the undead, which is to say, with much groaning, several exaggerated retellings, and at least one argument over whether moaning technically counted as speech. (It didn’t, but that didn’t stop the argument.)
The rumor was simple: Among the walking dead, there was a walker who was, allegedly, less dead than the others.
By noon, a respectable crowd of undead had gathered outside the sturdy doors of Apartment 4C, slamming various rotting appendages against the increasingly battered entrance in a display of what could have been hunger, but could just as easily have been mindless habit.
Either way, their patience was about to be rewarded.
Later reports from the scene would vary wildly, but most agreed that there was first a crash, then a yell. Or possibly a yell, then a crash. Either way, it was a very loud yell, and it seemed to be blaming someone named Wallace for not doing his job properly.
And then the stories take an even stranger turn.
At some point—right around the moment the entrance had nearly given in—there came the unmistakable sound of shattering glass. And then, to the absolute astonishment of the horde, a door came flying out of a third-floor window.
Some swore it flipped twice in midair. Others insisted it was three times. The only universally agreed-upon fact was that it landed directly on three youthful zombies, cutting their unlife tragically short. They had their entire undeath ahead of them, and now, well… they were really dead. Which, for a zombie, was frankly just embarrassing.
And worst of all, in the wake of this shocking, senseless tragedy—someone, from high above, had the audacity to laugh.
***
At the same time as the undeads’ tragedy, in a place far, far removed from Annabell’s universe (yet through the ineffable laws of narrative convenience, not entirely unrelated to her existence,) an elevator was engaged in the deeply bureaucratic business of moving two important figures between the Greater Dungeon’s—the Underfold’s—mid-tier levels.
“…Just remember,” said the older, who carried himself with the weary air of a man who had once, in a moment of weakness, tried to explain tax law to a cat, “be careful when you bid on dungeons from the Surface Layers. Even if the rumors say they’re from freshly—and slightly illegally—harvested worlds, don’t let them fool you into thinking you can strike gold for next to nothing. That’s how they get you. The Nexus won’t lift a finger even when you realize you’ve just spent thousands of credits on some damp basement filled with half-baked goblins and a core that wheezes like a dying kettle.”
“Then why are we even here?” said the younger, her nose wrinkled in a manner that suggested that she, wisely, would never even approach a cat. “I still don’t get why the Neo Nexus even bothers auctioning these things off? Just to scam overenthusiastic, start-up Dungeon Masters? Let some freshly integrated, no-name Delvers run through them a couple of times, I say. See if these backwater dungeons stabilize, and then decide if they’re worth—”
Rap! The cane struck her across the head with the force of a lesson learned the hard way.
“Delvers should never be allowed inside an unmanaged dungeon, you fool!” the older lectured. “That’s how you get Wild Dungeons—and nobody wants Wild Dungeons. Not even the most twisted members of the Nexus’ rule. Too much risk, too little profit, and worst of all—completely unpredictable and unbroadcastable. Absolute nightmare for advertising revenue. No, you keep your bids safe, don’t expect too much, and let’s just get this over with.”
The doors slid open with a polite ding to reveal a bustling, over-sized lobby, filled with the kind of people who were always about to make what they would later describe as "an extremely strategic investment decision."
“And we are here now because everyone else is here now,” he continued in a hushed tone, waggling his cane with the intent of someone who was going to use it again before the day was over. “I have heard that even the old codgers who swore they had retired from the scene are out sniffing about.” His voice became quieter still, conspiratorial even, “Rumors has it that even the System is preparing for something. This season is bound to be different from any we’ve seen before, and windfall waits for no one.”
With an important flair of his cloak, the older led the exit from the elevator with determined strides.
Now, as far as our story is concerned, neither of these figures are particularly important. No, the person an attentive observer might want to focus on was the third figure present in the elevator.
The one dressed in the plain shirt and black-red jacket of an operator.
He caught the silver coin tossed his way in midair, smoothly palming it with a polite smile, even going so far as to tip his cap as the two figures disappeared into the crowded lobby. And then, as soon as they were out of sight behind the shutting doors, so too was his smile.
“So, you have heard the rumors as well?” he murmured, already shrugging off the dull uniform of a working man as he reached for the elevator buttons once more.
For years, Lionel J’Khall had been waiting for the right opportunity to get a Dungeon of his own—to make a name for himself. And finally, it seemed that the opportunity was near.