Leaning back in the chair a few hours later, I rubbed my sleepy eyes, the fatigue weighing heavily on my eyelids like a thick blanket. Absentmindedly sipping what Gem insisted on calling coffee, I grimaced at the overly bitter taste. The liquid was murky and harsh, an affront to my taste buds. After all these years, I still couldn’t comprehend how her creators somehow enjoyed this sludge. I had to add copious amounts of cream and sugar to make it even remotely drinkable, but it kept me awake. When it got cold, however, it was a different story. I gave an involuntary shudder; no amount of cream could salvage it then.
“Well, I think I know what happened,” I said, my voice echoing slightly in the cavernous room. The gentle hum of the maintenance bots repairing the server racks' damage provides a comfortable background noise.
?Oh?? Gem responded, her voice tinged with curiosity.
“Yeah, and it would almost be hilarious if the damage hadn't been so catastrophic. It was a classic case of plain old bad luck with a dash of bad timing. You remember how I speculated that the mysterious crystals we stumbled upon on a few of the floors might be part of some new puzzle mechanism the dungeon was implementing?”
?Sure,? Gem replied, her tone teasing, ?I figured you were just talking out of your ass on that one, but I remember. ?
“I wasn’t that far off from the truth.” Ignoring Gem’s comment, I say, “The dungeon was planning to completely overhaul its final boss fight. Instead of the final floor opening into the boss room as it does now, a new room would be added with fifteen pedestals arranged in a circle. Fifteen of those crystals we found would be hidden on the various floors above, and delvers would have to find them. Once they placed the crystals on the pedestals, the mechanism would teleport them to the final boss fight.”
?That sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass from both a management and delver perspective,? Gem said; I could hear her shaking her head over the mental connection.
“Oh, I don’t know. I can think of a few ways to automate the entire process, so it might not be all that bad in the long run. Plus, I could see doing some interesting things with it once it's established, like every hundred teleports send the group to a different boss, or maybe a treasure room, or just some random floor. Just to spice things up a bit.”
?You’re not thinking about setting up your own dungeon when you finally settle down, are you?? Gem asked with mock seriousness. ?Because I get the feeling that it would be the most diabolical one on the planet.?
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Why thank you,” I said with a chuckle, “I think that's the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
?That wasn’t exactly a compliment,? Gem deadpanned.
“I know, but I’m taking it as one,” I said, a shit-eating grin spreading across my face. “Anyway, from what I could piece together, the dungeon was dealing with an issue of groups waiting for the final boss to respawn, and it had already lowered the respawn timer to its absolute minimum. To the point that groups had to either leave the room or use the checkpoint to teleport to the entrance right away or risk the boss respawning on top of them. In an attempt to provide a permanent fix, it seemed to take a page from those old games you told me about that were popular on your creator's homeworld. I believe you called them MMORPGs, specifically the mechanism where they loaded certain sections on the fly, allowing multiple groups to access the same content at the same time. You called it instancing, I believe? The dungeon was trying something similar, with five prebuilt boss rooms that the teleporter would send the delvers into.”
?Okay, that is interesting, and I do see what it was trying to do; I still think it’d be a pain the ass to manage, but to each their own. What does that have to do with what happened??
“I was getting to that,” I said, deftly flicking a video file onto the holo tank—the shimmering image swirling to life. “Watch closely. This group was navigating their way down the fifteenth floor; I suspect this was the group that went missing since they were the only group I couldn’t confirm made it out. Anyway, at the same time, the group encountered a group of enemies; the dungeon was reconfiguring something in the walls. One of the lightning blasts from their mage missed its target and hit the wall. Normally, that wouldn’t cause much trouble, but with the changes the dungeon was making, a path formed, allowing the lightning to surge to the core. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
?Shit,? Gem exclaimed, ?if that's not the definition of bad luck, I don’t know what is.?
“Agreed,” I nodded solemnly. “I'm just glad the damage wasn’t worse. I doubt there’s much we can do to prevent something like that from happening in the future, either. It was just one of those bizarre freak accidents that no one could have anticipated.”
?Damn, and here I was hoping I could go on a rant about my idiot creators,? Gem sighed dramatically.
“You know not everything that goes wrong is because your creators messed up,” I commented dryly.
?I know, but it's so much fun to curse them out, especially since they're not around to defend themselves.?
I just shook my head with a smile. Pushing back from the console, I stretched and said, “It’s getting late. I should probably get back to camp before anyone notices I disappeared.” I headed to the teleport pad after logging out of the console with a yawn. Today was going to be a long day, I thought as I appeared on the pad for the final floor. Now, the question was how I could buy enough time for the maintenance drones to do their work without everyone getting suspicious. Really, it couldn’t have been something as easy as a disconnected wire or something. I thought with a soft chuckle as I made my way back to camp.
