Soulforged Dungeoneer

The next three years were pretty boring, otherwise. Prison tends to be, unless the world is against you somehow. When a reasonably power wizard shows up at intervals to talk to you, though, the world tends to have a subdued attitude towards you.

The first time Harold showed back up, we actually just played chess and talked for a bit. I am a decently intelligent fellow--my Dungeon stats say my intelligence is a 57, where normally intelligent people were in the 15-35 range--but he was a wizard, and quite frankly, I should have known from the fact that he brought a chess set that I wouldn't have a chance against him. We got in ten matches in an afternoon, most of them being laughably short and one-sided.

The next time, he brought a wand.

"I'm curious, Jerry," he said with a facial expression that seemed to suggest he didn't really give a fuck about handing a prisoner a powerful weapon, "whether or not you can use items that are normally class-restricted. This wand doesn't do much for people who aren't wizards, because the abilities placed in it are all wizard spells, not inherent abilities."

I set the wand on the desk and hovered my hand over it, as I normally did to disassemble and absorb an item, and he watched with a look of fascination. Quickly, though, my face screwed up.

"There seem to be three basic qualities that determine how fast I absorb an item," I said after a moment. "First is volume--it takes longer to absorb something physically larger. Second is the number of abilities or specials on the item, with more powerful or more numerous abilities taking longer. Third is simply the amount of mana in the item--and this item has a lot of mana put into it. So, it could take me a few hours of work."

Harold looked disappointed, but tilted his head to the side. "Does it tell you how long, or is it an estimate?"

"Just an estimate. It's... a feeling of tension. It's like I'm watching something melting in acid, except I can vaguely feel it instead of seeing it. I know that it's melting, but I don't see it, yet. I can feel a sense of progress, but there's no hint of change. Over time, I'll feel it start to give, but if I haven't felt it give at least a little in the first few moments, that means it will take a while."

"Have you ever tried to absorb something you couldn't?"

"I haven't," I said. "I haven't really done anything particularly daring. If I don't think it will work, I just don't try."

"Have you tried potions?"

I shook my head. "I mean, the ability has to have limits, right? Potions are cheap, and if I can move enhancements from one thing to another, it seems like I could turn a potion of healing into bracelets of healing in a jiffy. I just kind of assume that's not how that works."

"Yes, I don't think the Administrators would allow that kind of thing." Harry's face kind of fell. "Still, I bet you could find some of the enchanted junk that comes out of the Dungeon and repurpose it. There's actually a lot out there that simply doesn't make sense. There's actually an Ebay store that sells all kinds of things..."

A few hours later, with me in moderate to light concentration all along, I felt the wand give way. "Ah, here we go," I said, and tried unsuccessfully to give an accurate countdown. "Three... well, maybe... three, two... one? ....okay, a little early--there we go." At that moment, the item seemed to collapse in on itself, and it appeared in my abilities list. I studied the result in my interface, then appeared the wand itself, and studied it.

"Well?"

"It has abilities," I confirmed, though my voice was dubious. I'd looked at the Dungeon's summary of the wand's abilities before, and things didn't match up exactly. "But I think it's definitely weaker, and the two high-level abilities are just missing."

"Oh. That's... a little disappointing, but it could be worse." The wizard appeared a notepad and scribbled some things on it. "What are the abilities? Can you activate them? Not here, I suppose. Honestly, I should have thought about that before. What does the interface say--"

We went back and forth over the item for the next couple hours, and he cloaked us for a few minutes so that I could test the wand without upsetting the guards. We agreed the abilities were vastly inferior to the spells, and seemed to just be skill enhancers for basic psionic-type abilities--Flame Strike became a weak Flame ability, and similar for Frost Strike and Static Bolt.

The real interest that we both had was what happened when those abilities were moved to new items. The only one that was of interest here turned out to be a Light Aura ability that he'd added to the wand, clearly as a utility more than anything else; when placed on a weapon, it gave the weapon a very slight offensive aura, and when placed on armor, a very slight defensive one.

"But really," I said as I studied my newly-recast Light dagger, "most of these things seem to be skill boosters, not stand-alone abilities. The boots are like that too. I think it's because the class is inherently psionic; I'm supposed to be using skill rather than Abilities. I only noticed it because of the boots; the description of the enhancement doesn't specifically tell me that it's a booster, but my ESL is higher with them on than off."

Harold nodded absently as he took note of that. "Descriptions never lie, but they rarely tell the truth," he said, and I thought I'd heard that witticism before, either on a bathroom wall or on Reddit. "You should invest some time into learning Appraise. Given how closely you have to work with items..."

"I don't think Appraise will help with the abilities and boosters," I countered. "I think there's a Sage skill, or Skill Sage or something similar, that gives you better descriptions for abilities. Even if my copies count as items, the enhancements don't, and those are what I need the most information about."

"Skill Sage," Harold admitted after a good five seconds of thinking about it. "It doesn't help me, as a Wizard, since my abilities are stored in physical objects. Neither does Appraise, according to the guild; the spell circles are just considered decoration until they're activated. Honestly, I was mostly expecting your ability to not even recognize them."

I made a face at him. "If I wasted hours absorbing a blank wand, I would have been pissed."

Harry gave me a shit-eating grin but didn't answer, instead writing something down that I didn't bother to try to read.

"I thought about what you asked last time," I said out of the blue. "About absorbing things that are too large, like the prison wall."

"Oh, yes?" Once again, Harold didn't look at all concerned, although I could hear the guard shuffling his feet nervously... again.

"I didn't try it, but I'm pretty sure that it would fail to activate, or else it would take days before the I got to the first tick. The way my power works, once I start absorbing something--once I hit the first tick, as I said--it gets the [Damaged] debuff. I have only once stopped halfway in absorbing something, and I didn't try to finish it. I figure if I start over, I'll only get a copy of a damaged item, right?"

Harold nodded absently, writing again.

"But if that could be weaponized, it would become an overpowered side effect. So let's say the power technically let me Damage the entire prison's structure by trying to absorb it all at once. That's crazy--tens of thousands of square feet of wall space would just suddenly start cracking and falling apart."

"But you think the limitation is probably time?" He glanced back at me, raising his bushy eyebrows.

"It takes constant concentration," I said. "If after eight hours, my attention slips? Start over."

"Ah." He nodded. "That acts as a natural barrier against absorbing items that are too powerful, I suppose."

"In theory." I grinned. "The Devil's Sword took me six hours to digest. Lucky the floor below a Boss floor is always a Town."

"...up to dungeon level 200, yes," he replied distractedly.

I didn't see the point of worrying about that nuance, not anytime soon. A little later, and he was finished for the day.

Somehow, news got to people who could actually put pressure on Harold that he had given me items and encouraged me to experiment with things in prison, which put quite a damper on his attitude the next few times he was there. They were rare visits, anyway--never more than once a month, and often less. He came back with increasingly technical questions, since we couldn't really play with anything, and later told me that (partly as punishment) he had been assigned to actually devise countermeasures that would keep me in the jail if I, or other Dungeoneers, decided to leave. He seemed to find the work distasteful, which I took in stride because I knew I wasn't a bad guy, but it gave me midnight thoughts about him really being a criminal mastermind or something similar for the following two weeks.

I didn't ask, though, and he continued to be the same blissfully attention-deficit wizard he'd always been.

There was a point when I was brought before a parole board, more or less a year after I entered prison, where I ended up feeling like the world was even stupider than I remembered--and I had been suicidal going into the Dungeon the first time. I could have sworn that three cartoon caricatures had been chosen as my interviewers: a moustache-twirling villain, a Disney princess (albeit out of costume), with a stone-faced bean-counter stuck in between the two.

Really--the one on the left had a big black handlebar mustache that he twirled, and the one on the right had clear three-inch heels and a hairdo that must have taken an hour of preparation. In between them was a thin old man with glasses who could not have sat straighter in his chair if you had replaced his spine with a straight steel rod, and could not have looked more disinterested if he was actually dead.

When he spoke (and he did most of the talking), it was in a slow, flat monotone, his speech filled with unnecessary pauses that might have been him breathing back in, if indeed he was using his lungs to talk, though I am not sure I ever caught his chest moving.

"This will be, the first, parole meeting, for inmate, number, three-one, four-two, seven, six-five, three. You have, to, this date, been, in prison, for, twelve, months." The flat man's eyes seemed to scroll up from the paper to my face without his face moving otherwise at all. "Do you, believe, that, you, deserve to, be, released, on, parole."

"I am not interested in parole," I replied, still of the opinion that it was better for me to serve my sentence.

"Do you, believe, that, you, deserve to, be, released, on, parole."

I blinked, stunned that after all of that, the man seemed unable to hear my answer. "No."

"Doctors, what, are, your, thooooughts." For some reason, he stretched the word out, craning his neck first to the man with the moustache.

"Let him out," the devil replied. "He's fine."

"No!" The princess stood up, knocking her cheap plastic chair backwards as she did. "He's saying that he doesn't want to be let out! I don't know why you would ever make that suggestion--"

"That's how this works, sweety," he said, pushing his chair back and putting his feet up on the table. "Unrepentent men do everything they can to get out. The people who are harmless are the ones who argue for more time in the slammer. I say let him go."

The flat faced man rotated his head at the neck towards where the princess should have been sitting. "Doctors, what, are--"

"I already told you, you daft imbecile, we're not letting him out. Now, look! He's barely begun serving his sentence, and he has already killed another inmate! And you want to suggested that he is cured?"

The flat man, not sure how to respond to being interrupted, began to repeat his question, and as the argument continued around him, he continued trying to be heard, but never did more than repeat his question in the same nonsensical monotone.

"Darling," said the man as he idly twirled his moustache, and I'm pretty sure, yes, he just drank from a flask, "criminals kill each other all the time. And this guy, he's one of those good criminals, the ones they put to work. The other guy? I heard he was a crackhead."

I was pretty sure that was not one of the many things wrong with Ham-hands Joe, and I was also pretty sure it was never an accusation I'd ever heard about him, either.

"I don't care if the man was the Devil himself! Unrepentant killers are supposed to be in jail! He said it himself--that he deserves to remain here, and this is where he will remain--would you SHUT UP," she shouted suddenly at flat-face.

The man in the middle, in the same even monotone, continued, "your, thooooughts."

"He goes free," said Mustache.

"He stays!" shouted Princess.

Having finally succeeded in hearing what was being said, flat-face turned his face forward and began mechanically writing on a piece of paper. Based on the sound of it, he was pressing very hard. After a moment, there was a snap, and the tip of the pencil flew off. Flat-face raised the pencil to his face to get a better look, and then with agonizingly slow movements, reached into an inside pocket of his coat and retrieved a manual pencil sharpener.

Princess ground her teeth loudly enough to be heard for the next fifteen minutes as flat-face carefully but exceedingly slowly sharpened his pencil, placed the sharpener back in his pocket, pressed too hard on the pencil when he placed it back down on the paper, snapped the graphite again, and started over... twice.

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

Finally, a good five minutes after he finally got his writing done, flat-face announced, "By, consensus, the, prisoner, shall, not be, released, on, parole, at, this, time." Head swivel left. "Thank, you, doctor." Head swivel right. "Thank, you, doctor."

Each made a bolt for the door immediately after being thanked, and I had to wonder just what manner of monster was hiding in that man's skin that kept the two of them waiting there so long.