Soulforged Dungeoneer

At about sixteen months, another inmate was transferred in who, unbeknownst to most, was also a Dungeoneer. He was perhaps the shortest adult human being I'd ever met--not categorically a midget, but well short of five feet, with comically bushy eyebrows and a habit of swirling his chin like he was expecting there to be a cigar stuck between his teeth.

Without him showing his Dungeon Card, I only knew his level--15. I figured out on my own that he wasn't a solo diver and guessed he was probably here for player killing. I also figured out on my own that he was probably a lot less repentant than me. Figuring that out didn't require him to open his mouth, but he did anyway.

"Hey pussies," he said, smacking the ass of every man he got close to. "What's goin' on, your new boss is in town. Hey, whose ass do I have to kick to get top-dog status here? I'm eager to have my cock sucked and I want you fuckers to get in line, 'cause we'll be at it all day."

It took me a while to find my resolve not to kill the fucker immediately. Naturally, they all pointed him my way anyway, and I think there was a morbid curiosity hanging in the air over exactly how many pieces the new meat was going to end up in by the end of the day.

When I was pointed out to him, he squinted at me, and I could pinpoint the moment when his brain compared two numbers to see which was bigger. All of a sudden, his face, which had been drawn tight while he stared at something over my head, split into a sheepish grin.

"Oh, hey, uh, sorry about that boss. I'm just, uh, haha, a little eager to get things started is all." He rubbed his hands together like a servile little shit and cringed as he approached. "You can call me Max, Max Bean. So, uh, do you mind telling me what the order of things is around here? I, uh, wouldn't want to step on any toes, you know."

I looked around the yard and caught dozens of people giving me little headshakes, and I could read in every single one of their faces, don't leave us alone with this guy. I couldn't help but chuckle, and shook my head.

"This is the order of things around here, dickhead," I said, not putting half the vitriol into my voice that I probably should have. "I'm your worst nightmare--a genuine criminal turned white knight. That means I'm not fucking running this place, and if I catch any scent of you using your strength to fuck with people, I'm gonna beat you into the ground."

The heartbreak on his face would have been pleasant if it wasn't so fleeting. He seemed to come to terms, quickly enough, with the idea that he couldn't get away with shit that he was probably gonna do anyway. I watched his head movements as he clearly went from processing to plotting, and then he started looking around at people, one hand on his chin, considering.

The next week of interactions made it increasingly clear that he was ridiculously, comically transparent. You could watch a plan form on his face, and then he would look at everything and everyone involved in that plan, one at a time, plant his tongue between his teeth and work on it for a bit while he ran the numbers. He would almost certainly do whatever he had planned, even if it was stupid as shit--mostly, of course, because he was actually really strong and tough, being a Dungeoneer, and there weren't a lot of consequences for failure.

I stood by and watched when a plan to turn two inmates against a third backfired and a about ten inmates ganged up to try to kick his ass. And they did--I'm not trying to say the little idiot didn't feel it--but after punching and kicking him for almost two minutes, when they finally cleared out and the guards picked the little turd up off his feet, he fussed for a moment and pushed the guards away, stumbling away under his own power. At his level, assuming his class gave him any toughness at all, he wouldn't have been in any danger unless they had some kind of weapon, or took a lot of shots at a weak point like his neck or eyes.

As time went on, it became clear that the only thing that Max was clear on was that I was stronger than he was. I think if he didn't see the number over my head whenever he looked at me, he would have forgotten that, too.

Somehow--and I have no idea how--Max did manage to find or start a smuggling ring, one that got goods from outside into the prison. He offered me cigarettes and porn mags, which I refused, and tried his best to figure out what he could get me, that might get me on his side.

His arguments weren't terribly persuasive. A lot of them were basically, "C'moooooon!" combined with a bunch of the same examples recycled over and over. Those examples were usually crap, but some days he did get creative.

"I could get you a toaster," he said one day, seemingly out of nowhere, and the suggestion was so absurd that everyone in the room--me, other inmates, and the guards--had to stop and stare at him.

"A toaster."

"Yeeeeeeeah, a toaster. Don't you want your bread toasted? C'mooon, work with me here, man!"

"Where the hell would I get bread to toast?" To say nothing of having a place to plug the damn thing in, which was its own challenge.

"Uhhh..." Max stuck his chin out for a minute. "I can get you somma that, too. Maybe like a loaf a month or something like that. C'mooon, what do you say?"

A number of people couldn't keep from laughing, and I was one of them, but in the end, I just turned back to my garbage prison food and ignored him.

Even I had to admit (if never out loud) as I suffered through something vaguely like mashed potatoes that an occasional serving of fresh toasted bread sounded good, but smuggling a toaster in to a prison? What the hell was wrong with this guy?

When Harold next showed up, I spent a good hour just talking about Max. That's not to say that I was impressed by the guy--far from it--but I suppose it was just a relief to have something to talk about that wasn't my dungeon class or heady intellectual things. Harry didn't seem to care, but at least he had the decency to listen and make occasional comments, and he did seem to smirk whenever I painted a particularly vivid picture of Max's thoughts crossing one by one across his face, like sheep slowly crossing a one-lane bridge. He didn't seem to find the ridiculousness that was Max funny, though; he just found something interesting in the telling, or perhaps he just liked stories in general.

"You should have him get you garbage enchanted items," Harry suggested after a while. "The cheapest ones on eBay are under ten dollars. Show him a magic trick, make a goblet disappear and replace it with one that shocks people. Someone like him would find that amusing."

"I think he'd try to use it to escape," I pointed out. "Not that he can, since they're not real items once I absorb them."

"Do you know what his class is?"

I shook my head. "Some kind of standard equipment-based fighter, guns I'd assume. I heard him talking about his time in the dungeon and he's always talking about shooting people. I suppose he could be talking about bows or even spells, but he always made it sound like guns. By which I mean," and I held up finger guns and imitated max's voice, "Bam! Bam! B-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d!"

"Right," replied Harry. "Guns."

I could only shrug.

His idea was a good one, though, so I lightly prodded Max to get me some garbage enchanted items, but with the suggestion that I could show him a trick rather than that it was really what I wanted. That left me, after a three-week waiting period, the proud owner of a Broach of Garbage Eating.

I looked from the item up to Max, who was grinning. "You know when I said garbage items, I wasn't being this literal," I said.

"Hey, I didn't pick it. You said just about anything cheap offa eBay would do it, and that's what came in." He sat across the table from me in the yard, and I knew people were watching us from the towers, but I decided to pay them no mind.

"Fine. I don't... ugh. I don't actually want that ability, but okay, here's the trick." The item was small, low quality, and almost out of mana, so it took mere moments to digest. Max observed it go away, and I suppose he thought it just went into my Inventory, but I flicked the broach back out in a couple moments, this time transparent blue. "Take a look at the description of the item. It's changed."

Max's eyes bugged out, and he looked around like I'd just shown him a very serious secret. "Shit--it says, it says this is a broach of Stealth, man. How did you do that? Can you just remake items?"

"Yeah. I can remake things I've taken apart. I already had stealth from something else, so I can put it on another item if I want."

"Can I keep this?"

I shook my head. "It's not real, Max. It's an ability, not a thing anymore." I deactivated the power, and it vanished from Max's hands. "That's the only problem, or else I could probably make bank on reselling things. They might work for a party member, but they don't last, and I can only have so many out at once."

"Shit, man." He continued to stare at his hands where a transparent broach had been a moment before. "You ever think of escaping?"

"I choose not to." I changed my seating on the bench to face mostly away from him. "I'm gonna do my time, 'cause I don't wanna be a bad guy anymore. I got a taste of it and it's not for me."

"Sure, okay, I get that, but uh," Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Max giving big blinks, from pinched tightly shut to fully open and back again, as he stared up at the sky. "You could be a not bad guy... out there."

"I got time, Max. I got time." I closed my eyes and wondered just what kinda Max-like idiocy was going to come next.

"So, uh, you ain't got a girl waiting, huh."

I turned to look at him, shocked that he put his finger on that so quickly.

"It's no surprise, man. All of us, we're human, y'know? My baby don't like me no more, but we still got together once a week and banged," and he made humping motions with his hips. "Bitches like it when you give them the sauce, you know?"

"Max..."

"But you ain't got nobody, man, that's sad." And to his credit, he seemed more depressed than sadistic when he said it. "Life ain't shit with nobody in it. Baby says that to me sometimes, she says Max, life ain't shit when you ain't around."

I had to look down as I had the sobering realization that I'd just gotten pretty solidly schooled in literally anything by Max Bean.