Today's Earth date: March 24, 1992

To occupy our minds, we tried to imagine how much money we would make if demons dropped loot like enemies in Final Fantasy.

We think there's something like 500 demons per floor, but that number seems to be going up. In that game, currency is called gil, and we agree that these demons should be at least 100 gil per.

That would be something like 100 grand for each of us when this was done, but in this world? No drops whatsoever. If you could ever measure how much good you're doing with money, this would be it, but nope. No gold.

The others think we're getting ripped off, but I think sacrifice is an essential facet of being a Hero. It's what we signed up for, and we need to trust that the world takes care of us when all this is done.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

"Should we camp out here to rest or is everyone good to keep going?" Wayne asked, standing on the wet stairs of the Earth Temple.

He saw shrugs all around. Nobody spoke, and nobody seemed upset by the idea of pushing onward.

"Yeah, I have the same feeling. Might as well cover as much ground as we can."

The unspoken words of that sentence were "because the Water Temple was ultra boring."

The party trudged up the steps. The doors looked the same as the Water Temple, but Wayne found that he didn't need to use Urg to open these. His raw strength stat was sufficient now.

The immediate interior matched the Water Temple almost brick for brick, but there were no decorative touches beyond the elegant masonry, and no water flowed along the hallways. The channels in the floor were there as if that's what should be happening, but everything was dry.

A dozen yards or so into the Temple, the doors slammed shut behind the Zeroes. A mechanic grinding echoed down the corridors like dozens of machines moving heavy objects. Shortly afterward, the floor came alive with reds.

"Welp," Wayne said, his hands on his hips. "This might end up being an actual dungeon crawl."

He walked back to the doors and tried to push them open. They didn't budget.

Urg.

Urg-Urg-Urg.

Nothing.

"We're locked in?" Fergus asked.

Wayne nodded.

"Lovely."

"We can always escape with Rise if we need to," Wayne assured his party. "Since we're on the hunt for the Earth Sigil, though, we should try our best to not do that. Otherwise, we'll have to trek all the way back down here all over again."

"Alright everybody," Armond said as he began readying his gear, "shake the cobwebs off and get sharp."

When the party was ready, Wayne went back to his "turn right" strategy for exploring dungeons, which meant turning right whenever there was a split in the path. He intended to explore the entirety of each floor, and that was how he did the same in video games.

"Traps," Margo said. Every person in the party stopped immediately. "The center path is all pressure plates. Looks like arrows shoot out of the walls."

Margo bent over and drew two lines on the floor.

"As long as we stay on the outside of these lines, we should be fine."

The party did as Margo instructed, moving carefully and quietly.

"Red around the corner," Wayne warned. "Listen for Margo to call out traps, but otherwise, follow Armond's instruction."

Without a word, the party assumed their formation. They stepped into a room with four walls and a door for each wall. Wayne's HUD said that the enemy should be directly in the center of the room, but all he saw was open floor.

After one more step inside, stone doors dropped from the ceiling, sealing the party in the room. The floor tiles where the monsters should‌ have been exploded. Green tentacles burst upward and lashed out at the party. At the same time, a swarm of hornets, each the size of quarters, erupted from the center of the tentacle monster and zoomed to attack the party. The collective buzz of their wings sounded like a cheap dirt bike.

Fart.

Fire.

Armond cast Smog, a spell that filled the room with poisonous gas while leaving the party unharmed. Wayne swatted a few hornets away with his hand while the poison did the rest.

The tentacles seemed unaffected by the gas and lashed out. Hector jumped in front of Wayne and blocked the first blow with his shield and parried the other with his sword.

"Everyone, backs against the wall!" Armond called when he saw the force with which the tentacles struck and how unbothered the monster seemed by Margo's arrows and Fergus' fireballs.

"Hector, drop your Wall of Fire on top of it."

With their backs pressed against the cold stone, the tentacles couldn't reach the party. They snapped like whips inches from their bodies.

The Wall of Fire formed from a row of plumes and stretched across the tentacle monster. It thrashed and seemed to shriek, but it couldn't extinguish the flames. The party peppered it with spells until every flailing arm went limp.

The doors raised, allowing the party to leave once again.

"Smells like calamari," Fergus said, sniffing the air.

"I have an idea why," Wayne replied. He scanned the floor for a body of one of the hornets. He pinched a wing between his fingers and examined the monster closely.

As it always did, Emverdo, the summon organizational chart spell from Spellcasting 101, had loaded Wayne's HUD with health bars as soon as enemies were within view. The quantity of the hornets was so great that Wayne default cleared everything so he could actually see to fight, but what he read in that brief moment stuck in his mind.

The hornets were named "swarming sea horses" and the tentacle monster was labeled "killer kiddy kraken."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

So Wayne wasn't entirely surprised when he saw that the "hornets" had the bodies of sea horses, but the visual was still disturbing. The sea horses had big insect wings and long black stingers on their tails. Fergus looked over Wayne's shoulder at the same miniature monster.

"How strange…" Fergus said.

Wayne dropped the sea horse and looked at the tentacles. A moment ago, he was certain they were the vibes of an evil plant. Though they were charred and scorched from the Wall of Fire, Wayne could see a toothy mouth at the center. He gripped low on one of the surviving limbs.

Urg.

The arm ripped apart and Wayne hit the wall. Chuckling, he dusted himself off and walked back to try again. Instead of Urg, he steadily pulled with his raw strength.

With a suction sound, he wrenched the monster completely out of its hole.

"It's actually a giant squid?" Hector said, looking at the sea monster lying dead on the floor.

"A 'killer kiddy kraken' to be precise," Wayne said, smiling. "Game developers on Earth used tricks like this all the time, and we saw some of them in the Lighthouse. Basically, it can be cheaper and easier to 'fake' an effect instead of doing it for real. When the dwarves switched this from a Water Temple to an Earth Temple, they repurposed their sea monsters."

"In a lazy fashion, I'd say." Fergus squatted, inspecting a pile of sea horse bodies on the floor.

The example Wayne wanted to share was the metro system from Fallout 3. Instead of building a system and a logic for the trains, they reused a system they already had: NPCs.

The player only ever saw a metro car, but beneath each of the cars was a NPC wearing a metro car as a hat. The metro car moving was actually this NPC running unseen underground.

Or perhaps it was simpler to explain how the first Super Mario Bros. used the same assets for clouds as they did bushes. They simply changed the color and most gamers went their whole lives without ever noticing the things in the sky were the same as the things on the ground.

Or would it be more accurate to describe this as an asset flip? That was doing the bare minimum to make a "new" game from existing art and code.

But Wayne changed his mind about bringing all of that up right now. No one else in the party ever played a video game, so these particular anecdotes felt too advanced to share in the midst of a dungeon run.

"Should we think about wedging the doors?" Armond asked, looking up under one of the doorframes.

"We don't have the materials to do that the whole way down," Wayne said, frowning. "Besides, the room was blood-locked. Was easy enough to open the doors again."

"Blood-locked?"

Wayne winced. "Sorry, that's a term I heard a game designer use on Earth. Basically, it means that the doors don't open until you kill all the enemies or in some cases, a specific enemy."

And that was the last novel element they encountered on the first floor. The other rooms were more of the same so the Zeroes used them to practice tactics and experiment with new unlocks.

The first floor had twelve kraken rooms and four arrow traps in total. For the krakens, the party figured out that the floor exploding didn't disrupt Wall of Fire, so Hector cast it from outside the room. When the party entered, the majority of the swarming sea horses died as they exited their Spawner directly into fire. When the last few were cleaned up, the party could sit back and wait for the damage over time from the fire to kill the kraken.

On kraken eight, Wayne felt the notification of a new unlock.

He now had his final ability from Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls. The system labeled it a Display setting, and the description read:

Naughty/Nice Mode - With its obvious satirical content, the game is intended for the amusement of adults or at least those old enough to see an R-rated movie (or sneak into one). It contains language and a general attitude that may offend some. It is recommended that these people buy the game, and then throw it away in a form of protest.

That sounded like a system for censoring mature content, like nudity or strong language. Wayne's Diary defaulted to Nice Mode, and he didn't notice any apparent change in his surroundings. The only immediate test Wayne could imagine started with asking Fergus to drop his pants.

Wayne quickly decided against that, but left the Nice Mode active to see if anything else seemed unusual.

On kraken nine, the Zeroes leveled. Everyone was now level 17 except for Fergus, who advanced to level 18. All the unlocks came from Buck Rogers, but Wayne noted that Fergus had already unlocked three spells from that game where everyone else was on their first. That was worrisome because Wayne didn't have another RPG in his system to set his party members to. Once Fergus was out of Buck Rogers unlocks, he would level without learning anything new.

No, that wasn't right. Wayne relaxed. Fergus had three slots of Phantasy Star II left to fill while Armond, Hector, and Margo had those slots open as well as slots from Ultima II.

They'd be fine.

When the party arrived at the room to fight their tenth kraken, the Zeroes with combat-focused unlocks tested their abilities instead of cheesing the encounter with Wall of Fire. Before they stepped inside, Fergus cast Dazzle Grenade. A ball of white light shot from his hand and burst into a blinding flash. Counting as he blinked and rubbed his eyes, Wayne found that he needed a full ten seconds to recover any semblance of vision.

What he observed roughly matched the ability description:

Grenade, Dazzle – Releasees a blinding electrical discharge arc. Characters or opponents in the effected area who are not wearing protective goggles must make a saving throw or be blinded to two to seven rounds.

When they triggered the blood lock, Hector shuffled sideways away from the party and used Distract.

The ability description read as follows:

Distract – Is the ability to successfully act as a diversion or to direct a victim's attention.

Which sounded like a taunt skill to Wayne, an ability tanks used to draw monster aggro onto themselves to protect the rest of the party. Sure enough, every single seahorse targeted Hector exclusively. The former bouncer squealed when they overwhelmed him. Armond's Smog spell came to the rescue, leaving only the kraken.

Launch Ball.

A giant silver ball, floating a few feet above the ground, shot forward and bounced off the far wall. It ricocheted back toward the party but smashed into the kraken first. The monster blinked white and thrashed with anger as the ball reflected into the back wall yet again. The angle sent it to the side, and then to Wayne, who stood with his sword ready.

He hit the ball with his sword, and it shot away like it had been hit by a pinball flipper. The physics didn't quite track. A steel ball of that size and moving with that speed shouldn't have been so easy to deflect, but it was.

As Wayne and his party worked to keep the ball in play, he noticed that the ball's damage increased exponentially with each subsequent monster hit, draining a third of the kraken's health bar in one shot by the final blow. When the kraken died, the room flickered and flashed as if it was the inside of a pinball table and the ball disappeared.

Wayne wanted to know if there was a cap on how much damage the ball could do.

Though it wasn't a combat ability, Armond was content with his Buck Rogers unlock:

Treat Critical Wounds – Is the ability to deal with severe injuries.

He believed it to be more powerful than Heal or Nares, the group-heal spell from Phantasy Star II.

Margo on the other hand, complained that her skill gave her an ability she already earned with years of practice:

Open Lock – is the skill of picking mechanical locks.

Wayne tried to suggest that perhaps it enhanced her skills or provided some sort of magic assistance, but Margo didn't want to hear it. Though he didn't say it out loud, Wayne felt the same as Margo. What did a locksmith need with an Open Lock skill?

At the stairs down to the next level, Wayne declared they were stopping to take a break.

Armond lay on his back, resting his head on his pack, and fell asleep immediately.

"Odd that Margo hasn't found any hidden dwarvish," Wayne said, thinking out loud.

"It's only the first floor," Margo assured him. "There's plenty of dungeon left."

"You're right."

"But how come none of these Spawners have had treasure?" Margo asked, readying herself to follow Armond's lead.

"Wish I knew," Wayne answered. "It's good experience though."

"Very good experience," Fergus added. "Our journey to the bottom is going to take a lot longer than we expected. I hope Sammy and Vanilli don't assume we're dead."

"It would be really nice if they could connect to Voice," Wayne said.

The awake members of his party nodded that they agreed.

"If the rest of the Temple is like a dungeon, then each floor will get more difficult. Everyone should get their rest. We'll need it."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.