Soulforged Dungeoneer

Now, the last time I came through Armand Bayou, this is where I ducked out: I'd gotten Merry's crystal on floor 9, just before the Harpy boss, and hatched her immediately after, then cleared one whole biome with my new Fairy companion and a huge-ass headache. So, at 15, I'd jumped ship; "the docks," which was the furthest point I was supposed to go to avoid meeting the big bad Heretic Knight, was the town at level 25. That meant that I had two more biomes to explore where I should be okay.

I'd not paid a whole lot of attention to the town on 15, but if the pseudo-narrative of the Dungeon said anything--from a maze to the invisible-floor harpy sky maze to the fake tower, then through weird gravity-flip mazes onto a weird island, which was disjointed enough that it might not be saying anything at all--then there were still a lot of plausible themes. Either falling into weird gravity town, or ancient ruins, or possibly coming out the top or bottom of the tower.

The town didn't give a whole lot of clues, though it was normally supposed to match the biome you were entering. It was kind of split by a wall, one side being inside the tower and the other being ostensibly outside on a moonless night, on a little stone platform that matched the fake tower exterior from before, with a little wall around it just high enough so that you couldn't look past that wall--except that the fake wall was painted on the real wall, so even if you tried to go over it, there was nothing to see. It explicitly hid any clue of the next biome, as far as I could see.

So I shrugged and ducked into the exit, coming out in freefall during a meteor shower.

Now, we all know the Dungeons well enough by this point to know not all was as it seemed here, but in terms of what it seemed like... there were about a thousand flaming rocks that were burning their way through the atmosphere and throwing off smoke and debris, while pointed at a huge port city, which (disappointingly) was not Galveston, New York, or anything else I could immediately recognize. It might still have been a real place, but I didn't know. Naturally, if that's what was really going on, the wind would have pushed me off immediately, assuming that the dense rocks had a higher terminal velocity than me, which was a safe bet... but there was a persistent high wind that just didn't happen to be nearly strong enough to represent re-entry. I'm not a rocket scientist, but the fact that re-entry destroys giant, incredibly solid rocks tells me I probably wouldn't survive riding on one.

Anyway, along with the wind, there was kind of an iffy light gravity that pulled me to the "side" of the meteor, so that I could look forwards to see the ground below, plus again there was smoke, debris, and fire everywhere. That was all, in my mind, a set of minor complications when faced with the floor baddies: they were lanky humanoids with flaming skulls for heads, dressed in some kind of stereotypical clown outfit and slowly bouncing around aimlessly. Around them were small, brightly colored birds, also with flaming skulls.

The System named them "Galactic Doomsday Inferno Pierrot" and "Galactic Doomsday Inferno Parrot," respectively.

My appearance attracted the birds first, with the Pierrots clearly noticing my arrival but not swarming in the same fashion. I appeared my weapon, but even the birds didn't immediately attack. Instead, they pulled into a tight circle around me, all squawking "DEATH" and "SUFFER" and "IT IS THE END OF DAYS" and similar apocalyptic lines, in shrill voices that were an awkward mixture of "normal parrot voice" and "parrot's death scream as it is burned alive." Likewise, the smell was... not great, and the less said about it the better.

Though sometimes I wouldn't bother killing things that didn't attack me first, the voices were more than bad enough to justify going out of my way, even though as soon as I behaved aggressively, the rest immediately attacked.

They weren't that hard to put down, even though at this level they had fairly high health. I arranged my equipment to project Strife Aura, among other things, but the birds didn't really seem to be working together in the first place--they were just kind of berserk. Yes, a few of them clawed and pecked at each other, but that didn't seem to screw up their programming very much. Maybe they were mostly trying to set things on fire, and therefore didn't target things that were already on fire? Anyway. It might have been harder for someone without telekinesis, or the ability to fly, or the ability to teleport, but my Cloak gave me all of that, and Blink enhanced the last quite a bit.

The flame-head Pierrots within range had taken the time to kind of pensively bounce around until they were all between me and where i was going, but they just kind of sat there, mostly with their hands behind their backs, their flaming skull heads staring at me incessantly.

When they spoke, they all spoke as one, and all in the same gravelly, uneven voice that was definitely someone's interpretation of the word 'demonic'.

"You have seen the end of days," they said. "You are one who wishes to see the end of days. You are one who may yet see the end of days. The death that is coming; the end of the world. All worlds end, and the coming death is a sacrifice to Armageddon."

That... confused me. Like, yes, I could understand an Administrator's mobs knowing that I was on a Full Clear Quest to become an Administrator, or that they knew I had been given access to the secret nastiness that was the history and future of the Labyrinthine Star. But it was definitely out of character for the same Administrator who put a whole bunch of high level boob- and dick-joke reward items into play just a little while ago, or who had the last boss be a giant dancing puppet that never took anything seriously but was still exceedingly likely to kill anyone that happened to be dumb enough to fight it.

Granted, I could see "clowns riding meteors to wipe out civilization" as being in her character, but prophetic ones? That didn't seem right.

I don't know for sure, Merry said, as she put aside the things she'd been thinking about to examine the clowns, but I think it's a standard thing. Maybe it comes automatically when they're Doomsday creatures?

The Pierrots continued to talk. "There is no safety, and the sacrifice is no shield. Worthy and unworthy alike will burn in the fires of eternity, fueling the engine of great malice as it consumes civilizations. Your hopes and dreams are the built on the ashes of those who came before you, and the ashes of your dreams will cover the graves of those who follow."

I felt like shutting them up, and wasn't really in the mood to quip, so I lunged at the nearest clown, who let me stab him through the heart with my manifested longsword. Instead of reacting in any way violently, the clown leaned its flaming skull towards my face, and whispered, "I had dreams once." Then, it threw its head back and laughed, the inferno from its burning skull descending down its skeleton until the entire thing was consumed.

From its body burst a whole bunch of flame-head Parrots, all of whom screamed, "DEATH!" the moment they were released. A moment later, all of the Pierrots also screamed, "DEATH!" and pulled various weapons from behind their backs--all of them somehow chain-related.

Unnerving as this all was, absolutely nothing here actually made this fight difficult. Traumatizing, yes; difficult, no. Was I creeped the fuck out? Absolutely. Were any of these things unkillable, or did they exist in such quantities that I couldn't get through them? Nope. They didn't even all swarm at once, like the cannibals in Pearland. It was just another creepy-ass step along the road.

The rest of the level's Pierrots didn't bother trying to talk, at least. Instead, they all started off by bounding around aimlessly and sobbing quietly, then dramatically revealed weapons while screaming "DEATH!" some time after I came in range. All of them, upon death, released more parrots, but not in huge quantities.

Navigating the Dungeon was also not actually that difficult, or not for me. You had to progress from one giant, flaming rock to another, going generally "forwards" towards the ground that wasn't actually coming closer to you as time went on. There were no solid platforms between the rocks, but with low gravity, even a relatively nonathletic Dungeoneer should have been able to make the jumps. In a few places, there were stepping stones, but I didn't care.

The second floor was almost identical to the first, except that the arrangement of meteors wasn't so straight-forward. In order to progress forwards, you had to go upside-down and sideways along a winding path of meteors, the gravity being such that you were always pulled to the nearest meteor, even if you were at odd angles to "down". Which... since the planet below should have been the proper "down", you had to go out of your way to even pretend that was how things worked.

Adding to the existing baddies, this level had flaming-headed musclemen and priests, termed "Galactic Doomsday Inferno Jocks" and "Frocks" respectively. The Jocks, when they weren't hunting me, actually seemed to be having a lot of fun out there, constantly running and jumping, using the light gravity and relatively small rocks to fling themselves into orbit and make complicated flight patterns as they transitioned form one rock's gravity field to the next's. The Parrots tended to follow them, and mixed their apocalyptic slang with some random insults or compliments when a Jock made a good or a bad flight.

The priestly Frocks were every bit as creepy as the Pierrots had been at the start, except that each individual would come by to say something creepy before going insane.

The first one I ran into set the tone, by bowing to me, then straightening and saying, "I hope that all your loved ones suffer in fire before they perish." Then, the holy book in his hands ignited, and he spread it open like a spellbook, raised one hand above it, and out popped a ten-foot-long, two-foot-wide sword of pure fire, which he manipulated with magic.

Earlier in my career, I might have envied that sword, but after spending so long with the Executioner, I was happy to have my much smaller weapon.

The Jocks, when they did bother to hunt me down, were largely a mix of trying to flying-superman-punch me on the end of a long orbit or landing nearby, charging up to me, and regular-dude punching me. They didn't talk much, although they did yell and scream a lot.

I was about three-quarters of the way through the second floor of the biome when Merry's attention was drawn to something, which turned out to be a secret. On the far side of one of the meteors, in a place where you wouldn't have seen it, was a diner. I was confused, not least because there was no signboard outside; the staff all had flaming skull heads, so they were all Galactic Doomsday Infernal variants, if all entirely peaceful and silent as the grave, but it was only when I decided 'The hell with it' and sat down and was given a menu that I could figure out why it was here.

According to the menu, the diner was a GDI Fridays, and I ended up staring at the flaming, striped logo for a long time. Not because it took me a long time to get the joke--I admit it still took me a second, but not that long. I just... I just couldn't decide whether I loved or hated the Administrator more for making even this macabre, horrifying place into a cheap pun.

The waitress stood there at my table, waiting for me to order, with her flaming skull head and her pleated skirt, looking like an average young-adult waitress just so happened to have had her head consumed by fire and was okay with it. When I took a moment, she tapped her pencil on her paper order booklet impatiently, and I glanced over the menu, noting that all of the dish were references to something or other, many obviously being from this dungeon--so I assumed the rest were, too, just for places I hadn't been yet. There were "aged" dire boar flank steaks, a "barbecued blackhole boneless boar belly buster" (the description said it was 32oz--that's two pounds--of rib meat), Harpy burgers happy meals (which I respected, despite it being in the wrong restaurant, if you could even call fast food a restaurant), and... they actually named the appetizer referencing the "Gobble-cock hungry horde" enemy from that biome "cock gobblers," making me feel entirely vindicated in immediately thinking of the small, feral birds as such when I'd encountered them.

I glanced over the rest of the menu, but not all puns were equally good or bad, whatever your perspective. The Barbarian Caesarian salad might have had some nuance to it that made it funny to someone else, but it didn't scream out to me. The Atlantean Marionette Asiago-stuffed Mushrooms didn't even strike me as funny, although it did occur to me that it might be referencing how the Marionette was hollow. Meanwhile, the food from this biome, labelled as "EXTRA SPICY," was "GDI Fridays Nacho Planet Anymore."

I considered the name silently.

Ultimately, after confirming that I could order carryout (she nodded, but neither she nor any of the other staff ever said anything in words), I bought a whole bunch of stuff, trading away monster corpses from the biomes I'd been through and paying off the rest of the bill with cash or random stuff I didn't care about. I also asked the waitress if I could keep a menu, and she just shrugged, wordlessly.

I knew that if I didn't bring back a menu, even if I did bring food, Louise would never forgive me.