Soulforged Dungeoneer

There are a lot of different ways you can put emphasis on the word "she" in the sentence, "And then she walked into the room." In fact, you could even put emphasis on different words in the sentence, if you really wanted. Each variant of the sentence means something a little different.

Anyway, room, walked, she. The room being the club, the she being a priestess, level 30, assuming that her silken robes weren't just a costume. Walked was just walked, mostly. She got a drink, but not a drink. She sat alone, in the booth closest to where I was standing. She had a face like an angel, and I wasn't falling for it. I'd seen a lot of very pretty priestesses--all of them, honestly. She also had enormous boobs, and while that wasn't usually my thing, that was a little harder not to fall for, especially the way her robes displayed them.

The whole thing was weird. I was already at the phase of the night where I was stealthed (I would call it practice, if anyone asked) instead of sitting alone at a booth. She got hit on right away, and she very quietly (she had one of those pure, angelic voices, too, patient and kind) just demurely said "No, thank you, I'm fine," whenever anyone asked anything.

And when she was left alone for just a little while, she turned and looked right at me.

My stealth skill isn't just for show, not that it's unbeatable; I used it to not die in the dungeon. By no means did it make me invisible, but... for a certain class of attention, it kind of did. NPCs hit by stealth acted like I was gone, and people affected by it had a hard time focusing on me, but only if they knew something was wrong. If they didn't, it was kind of blissful--I knew, as a teacher of stealth class, that sometimes you just didn't know you were being hidden from, and everything seemed fine.

Being found out made my heart pound out of my chest, especially when she had a face like an angel and a look of absolute serenity on it. She'd mostly otherwise been looking down at the table or generally around the club, like she was looking for something. When she saw me, it was all at once; her eyes locked onto mine, in a moment when I glanced at her, and they didn't waver or flicker away.

She smiled, and said, "Hi."

I fumbled with my words for a moment. "Hi, sorry," I said after a moment. "I'm not doing anything, I just... don't like people bothering me, but I like to be out."

"It's fine. Do you mind if we talk for a minute?"

That... felt weird, but I moved around the end of the booth and took a seat, letting the stealth drop. "Not at all. My, uh, my name is Jerry."

"I'm Louise Velvetine. I'm, um, not a priestess of one of the Dungeon Gods." She looked down, as I carefully avoided a surprised reaction. "I know that's a weird thing to say, right? But apparently there are some in the real world, too."

"I... had heard that the existing ones didn't seem to..." I made a vague gesture but didn't want to continue, because it was the kind of thing that often started arguments.

"Right. But that doesn't mean there aren't any. I'm honestly not sure how it works, but I tried, and... I guess they let me. Or someone did."

I looked at the woman's face. She wasn't young, I realized after a moment; she (like all priestesses) was given some kind of health boost that made her youthful, but somehow I could tell that she was different. "Well, as long as it's real. And, I guess, not evil. That's all that matters, right?"

Louise nodded, her lips pursed like it was inappropriate to say something. After a long moment of quiet, she said, "I was given an instruction to come here. My god said that I would find someone here that needed to be redeemed."

That was a very odd statement, made more odd by the fact that in my inventory was an item that talked about redemption. I figured it would be crass to start with that, but more importantly, I wasn't sure that I liked the idea of a god deciding whether or not to redeem me all on their own, without talking to me at all. "What does that mean, exactly?"

She looked at me, and although there was a little worry around her eyes, she seemed otherwise at peace. "I'm not sure," she said. "I've never done this before."

I looked the priestess up and down, doing my honest best not to dwell on her enormous rack. I think I did okay. "But what does it mean to you?"

"I don't know. I guess talking?" She tilted her head and gave me a similar looking over. "Do you feel like you want to talk about something?"

A few things came to mind. "No. Or at least, not here."

"We can talk somewhere else..."

That problem became quickly swallowed up by another problem, as a thin guy with greased hair and a number over his head twice mine walked up to the table, with a swagger to his hips and a slight ditziness to his actions that spoke of being a drunk who fancied himself a lothario. "Hey babe, you wanna dance? I'll bet you I'm twice this guy in more than just level, ah-haha, hahaha!"

I don't... I don't really know why he thought that would be a solid burn, not between dungeoneers, but I guess he had been drinking.

Louise put a look on her face that was a cross between her earlier polite dismissals and something slightly more panicked, but said in her normal quiet voice, "No, thank you--"

"Come on," he said, and grabbed her by the wrist, trying to pull her upright. She struggled against it, for only a moment.

I'm probably the only one in the room who would categorize what I did next as "holding back"--but then, people here didn't know me very well. With the help of telekinesis, I gave him an uppercut to the nose, since he was very much looking down on Louise (specifically into her chest, but "down" in general), and that combo was enough to have him off his feet and in the air for a moment, pivoting more or less around his hips to land in a backflop on the floor with a resounding crash.

The music didn't stop, but the people did. The aggrieved party took a moment to squirm on the floor, but then did a quick front flip from laying on the floor to standing, and when he swung at me, he swung for blood. Fortunately he hadn't noticed that I'd used telekinesis, so catching him and redirecting him into a wall wasn't hard. He wasn't hurt--even with the boost, I didn't so much as give him a bloody nose--but it was a humiliating loss, and I was able to keep him from advancing pretty effectively.

"Motherfucker," he snapped at me, murder in his eyes, "fucking... the hell is... fuck you!"

"She said no, asshole," I replied, trying to keep my voice even.

Security was making its way over, but none of them were dungeoneers--and dungeoneers were closer and already moving to break it up, or so I hoped. One guy, I would later learn, was about two seconds from smashing me in the back of the head with a chair, before someone else caught him and stopped him.

"You need to leave," said the next person who arrived, and although it wasn't clear whether the man was talking to me or the perv, I think it's fair to say that the answer was "yes", so I just nodded at him. The problem was him, though, more than me; I let him go and just held shields against his inevitable attacks, but the man who intervened--broad shouldered and level 80, well above either of us--caught the perv's fist and squeezed, making his knees buckle, and he whimpered little pain noises as he sunk to the ground.

"Come on," I said to Louise, offering her a hand. "If you want to talk, we'll talk somewhere else."

She looked at me, then at the perv, and said, "But what if he's the one--"

"Louise..." I found a dead tiredness in my voice that I wasn't quite expecting. "You can do that, but I'm leaving."

She looked at me, then swallowed, and instead of moving to follow, moved towards the man now suppressed on the floor.

I sighed, feeling like I'd just been dumped for a complete waste of a person, and walked off.

Security at the door warned me against causing trouble again, which was of course fair. I wasn't really hot blooded at that point, just grumpy. They asked for my ID, which I gave them--whenever normal security couldn't handle a Dungeoneer problem, they just made a note of it for other Dungeoneers to solve later--and after they wrote down the information, I was free to go.

The hot evening air left me unsettled, and I stared at the light-polluted sky for a long time, wishing there were more stars to see in suburbia, then went and sat in my car. I didn't go home; I didn't really want to. I checked my mail and the news fruitlessly, as I did a few times throughout the day, and then just sat there, wondering what it was all supposed to mean.

Redemption? Was there some kind of karma system to the Dungeon, were the stupid skulls involved, or was there something less mechanical at play? Maybe just normal meddling? I let my breath out through my nose with a frustrated sigh and finally started my car to head home.

I didn't see Louise again for a while after that.