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38 - Dungeon Disaster Drills and Library Trolls
🕑 Added 2025-02-19 22:04:11 +0000 UTCIt seemed elementary schools weren’t the only ones interested in disaster preparation drills.
Aiden and Luke also prepared a similar seminar for the Hovelton inhabitants, but this one was on dungeon emergencies and what to do when an unstable dungeon spawned near you.
The seminar was held in the Green Fox Village retirement home because it was the only place that had a conference hall big enough to hold over two hundred people. It wasn’t always that big, according to Luke. It had been a lot smaller, but then one of the retirees, the father of a famous Arcadian actor, personally funded the expansion of the conference hall, so that they could host a big bingo night for all the elders in town every month.
Lexie stepped into the hall that had soft lighting from large windows overlooking a rose garden and greenhouse. The hall itself was far away from the retirement home apartments and right beside the woods to enhance the cozy and immersive Sylvan vibe. Wooden panels creaked underneath their feet as they walked, and the room felt slightly stuffy with wooden round tables scattered about, vintage decors, and interesting dog paintings lining the wall. It also smelt like mint tea and camphor but it wasn't a wholly unpleasant scent.
When Lexie and Aiden arrived, there were already about fifty people in there, mostly senior citizens except Rose, Evan, Emma, Xena, and a few other nurses from the Healing House.
Even though the town was small, Lexie knew it wasn't that small. Fifty people meant that a lot of people didn't show up, either because they didn't care about the situation, or because it was Aiden giving the presentation.
If it was the former, then Lexie thought the people of Hovelton were severely underestimating the power of an unstable dungeon. Perhaps because none of them had had to battle a dungeon beast before and no one had died yet from the increased occurrence in Hovelton.
Nothing too bad had happened because Max and Aiden kept stopping the dungeons from spawning. And ironically, that seemed to have lured the townspeople into a false sense of security, where they felt like there was no true danger and this meeting was going to be a waste of their time.
Lexie suddenly recalled what Theo Firebringer said about true hero work being preventative and hence invisible. She finally understood what he meant.
She also felt bad for her dad, because the people here who weren't very acquainted with him, eyed him with either suspicion or a distinct lack of enthusiasm on their faces. Aiden didn’t look like he minded much though. Probably because he was used to it.
On the contrary, he looked semi-excited to be giving a presentation, even if it was only to a small fraction of people. He was even wearing a tweed suit with patched elbows that looked like what her dad used to wear to lecture at his college. She wondered if Aiden had made the extra effort to dress up because he was happy to be teaching again. Lexie figured that was the case because she knew how much he enjoyed teaching her.
According to Aiden, the dungeon disaster lessons thing was Luke’s idea. The mayor figured since they could no longer deny the abnormally increased occurrence of unstable dungeons, then they might as well advise the citizens on what to do. Of course, Max was supposed to lead the discussion, but on the day of, he was nowhere to be found.
“It’s my fault,” Luke muttered as Aiden met him standing at the side of the room. “For actually believing him when he said he would be here.”
Aiden nodded. “It’s okay. I’ve always preferred solo presentations anyway.”
That didn't mollify Luke but Aiden and Lexie went to take their seat anyway, at the far right of the room with Emma and Xena on their left and Rose on their right.
Lexie and Xena didn’t make eye contact. Apparently, Xena hadn’t yet broken it to Emma that they were friends, because she didn’t want Emma to gloat, so basically they had to still pretend to hate each other in public.
Lexie didn't get it, but she was starting to accept Xena's peculiarities.
Aiden checked his watch, waited for a few more minutes for people to arrive, then he cleared his throat and stood. He went to the front of the room, folding his hands in front of himself and giving everyone a welcoming smile.
“Hello everyone,” he started. “Thank you for coming here today.”
“Not like we had much of a choice,” an old man with a shock of white hair grumbled. “They said they would cancel bingo for the month if we didn’t come. Practically held a gun to our heads.”
Aiden shared a look with Luke who shrugged. Lexie guessed that the mayor pulled some strings with the retirement home managers to get that concession, in order to encourage more of the elderly to attend. And they still only managed to get less than fifty of them.
“Sorry about that," Aiden said politely. "But this is truly an important discussion to have. To make up for the inconvenience, I’ve also taken the liberty to prepare some cookies for the evening. Oatmeal raisin and snickerdoodles, recipe from the baking queen herself." Aiden had had Emma bring in the cookies earlier since he'd known he would be arriving a little late. "They're at the back and there are a lot of them since we seem to have overestimated the amount of attendants today. Please, take as many as you like.”
A few of the nurses stood and shuffled over to take the cookies. None of the senior citizens moved.
Probably waiting to see if it's poisoned. Lexie truly hated the distrust they had for Aiden but if she thought about it rationally, she couldn’t blame them. They probably didn’t know him as well as she and Emma and all the other nurses did. All the elderly knew about him was the bands on his neck and wrists, which he’d tried to cover up somewhat with a long-sleeved button-up shirt.
Aiden continued speaking in a pleasant but serious tone. "As you all must have heard by now there’s an increased occurrence of unstable dungeons in the region. We don’t know why that’s happening–”
“I heard it was the aliens.” The old man who spoke up first crossed his arms over his chest. “Probably those Fae bastards trying to be our alien overlords again.”
“Man, that’s horseshit,” another darker-skinned man countered. He was broad-shouldered and jolly-faced, wearing a fisherman’s hat, cargo shorts, and duck-patterned socks halfway up his calves. “They got everything but a god on that thrice-damned planet of theirs. What the hell would they need earth for?”
“Could be the Orcs.” A woman who was knitting furiously pointed out. Her fingers continued knitting as she spoke. “My granddaughter tells me that she saw a video of orc spaceships circling the earth looking for a point of entry that would bypass human watch.”
“My grandson told me the same thing!" The first man called out. "The orcs and the Fae are scheming against us!”
“That’s just a conspiracy theory,” Emma said a little loudly to be heard over the din. “And it has nothing to do with the presentation today. Aiden is going to teach us about Dungeons.”
“Precisely,” Aiden sent Emma a grateful look but before he could say anything else the first guy interrupted again.
“Earth is the greatest planet in the bi-solar system, I tell you.” He gestured around, searching wildly for validation. “That's why all those aliens want a piece of us. But we will resist invasion with our lives if need be and we will not negotiate with extraterrestrial terrorists!”
“No one is terrorizing you, Frank.” Annoyance crept into Emma’s voice. “And no one is invading Earth either."
“Certainly not the Fae,” a quieter well-dressed older man in a double-breasted brown suit said. He adjusted his glasses. “They don’t need to. They’ve already taken over.”
There was a host of murmurs ricocheting at that statement and the man continued, “They created our System, so they probably have back doors everywhere. They collaborate with all the important systems [Roles] and even our government. What else is there to dominate?”
“Our human spirit,” Frank said. “The Fae have no soul.”
“Racist ass," someone muttered from the back. Lexie was surprised to find that it was the woman with the purple eyebrows who’d given her the slab of meat that other time. She frowned at Aiden. “How long is this gonna take? The girls and I have mahjong in the evening.”
“Yeah.” This raspy declaration came from a man in a straw hat committing the most aggressive case of man-spreading Lexie had ever seen. “And I gotta get back to the farm.”
“It will only take an hour, Mr. Lochlan. Sooner if you kind folk will let me get my point across.” Aiden must have had the patience of a saint because he sounded more amused than annoyed by their constant distraction.
Lochlan turned to the other people who were still murmuring among themselves about Fae backdoors and orc spaceships and snapped,“You heard the man. Quit your yapping so we can get this over with.”
There was a brief second of silence, which told Lexie that this Lochlan guy’s words carried a lot of weight in this town. Everyone in the room seemed just a little scared of him, and they didn’t seem to afford that same fear to the literal ex-[Villain] standing right in front of them.
Sure, maybe some of them were apprehensive of Aiden when he walked in, but now they just faced him with the annoyed hostility of children who were forced to do homework before watching their favorite cartoons.
“Thank you,” Aiden said. “Anyway, as I was saying, unstable dungeons are cropping up more frequently than before, and though Max and I are trying to get rid of them before they spawn, there might come a day when we won't be able to. Therefore, we need everyone to learn proper dungeon disaster management. The first thing to know is that if an unstable dungeon spawns, the system will sometimes give an alert. Not all the time, as occasionally the system does not detect unstable dungeons. But at least fifty percent of the time it will. Everything within a mile radius should immediately evacuate. Now if you’re close when it spawns, you might get sucked into the orbit and so you have to lay low and crawl on the ground to maintain your balance. And since UD’s typically spit out monsters, we would also like to teach you some basic monster defense–”
A woman in the back snorted. “Imagine us trying to fight dungeon creatures. Gertrude fending off a troll with her walker–”
“At least I’d be able to get away quick enough without gasping for air, mouth breather.”
“Yeah Amy, unless you can get it with your C-PAP machine.” Another woman cackled as Amy glared.
“The Fae didn't give us real magic for a reason,” Frank said, clearly not done with the topic. “And it's because they’re scared of us. They know with our human spirit, we would become stronger than them and we would soon be their alien overlords!”
“How are the kids the only well-behaved ones here?” Emma muttered and Lexie grinned.
The rest of the meeting went very much like the beginning. Aiden would barely manage to get two sentences out and then the conversation would get derailed by talk of Fae, or Orcs or just random insults flung between the elders. It got to a point where Luke finally snapped and said no one was allowed to mention anything about aliens again. Meanwhile, Lexie noticed that Evan was starting to get fussy in his mother’s arms and was whining, so she decided to distract him by activating the <Party Hopper> card.
Rose gave her a grateful look which Lexie smiled politely at. Things were still a little awkward between them after the hospital fiasco. Even though Rose apologized, Lexie could admit that she still held the tiniest bit of a grudge against her. At the same time though she couldn’t really hold it against her, because Rose was genuinely out of her mind with fear for her son when she said all those awful things to Aiden.
So Lexie couldn't hate her. But she couldn't like her either.
Hence the awkwardness.
Evan watched the frog flip over again and again and clapped his hands in delight while Luke and Aiden tried to get the room under control again. Evan kept trying to grab the frog but his hand kept passing right through. Lexie wondered if there was a way to make the frog more solid. Pushing more mana into her pathway did make it jump higher but didn’t make it denser. Hmm. Maybe it was time to do some experiments with…Froggy?
No, Froggy was a stupid name.
How about Sir Toadword Hoppington?
By the end of the allotted hour, Aiden only managed to get across maybe half of his presentation. Which meant that they would have to do this again, next week.
That brought about groans of protest but Luke was pitiless.
“Well if you all wanted to get it over and done with, you should have just paid attention in the first place," he said coolly. "Same time next week. Or else.”
They all acquiesced but not without grumbling about the mayor on their way out.
“Gosh-darned Mayor. Who elected him anyway?”
“I bet he’s an agent installed by the fae,” Frank muttered as he walked. “That’s why he got all pissy when I talked about them.”
“Yeah. And he took away bingo night and brought a criminal here to lecture us.”
Lexie subtly glared at the woman who’d made the last remark but the older woman didn’t look her way as she shuffled out of the room with her group. Then again, Lexie doubted the woman could see much even with the huge readers she had on.
Neither Luke nor Aiden seemed offended by any of the insults from the group, even though they undoubtedly heard them. If anything, Aiden appeared amused and Luke just seemed annoyed in general, rubbing his forehead in circles.
“They’re worse than grade schoolers," he said.
“Can confirm,” Lexie said.
Aiden shrugged. “It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, frankly. At least they seemed suitably engaged in the discussion.”
“They were engaged in making a mockery of everything.” Luke gave him a look that reminded Lexie of Max.
“Still. That’s something. They say denial is the first step to acceptance.” Aiden patted Luke’s shoulder comfortingly. “We’ll call this meeting a partial success.”
***
Later that week, Lexie received a stroke of good luck and finally found a book that could potentially help her get started on learning crafting.
And she found it by accident too. She was watching a video where a girl used different card activation techniques–delayed activation, and stuttered activation–to vary the card activity without manipulating pathways. She wasn’t explaining very well how she was doing it, but while scrolling down the comments, Lexie came across a link for someone who said they had a book that could help.
The link disappeared after about a minute, either deleted by the person who wrote it or by the owner of the video, but not before Lexie had taken it down. She went to the address of the link and it led her to a chatbox with someone who called themselves The Library Troll.
Um hello? she typed.
LibraryTroll: Hello! Library Troll is here for all your knowledge needs. Tell me what you want. And do it quickly, only online for 3 minutes.
Why? Lexie wanted to ask but she didn't want to waste time. This whole thing seemed sketchy but she was too curious to back out now.
Lexie: You said you had a book that could help learn more about card pathways?
LibraryTroll: Yes. Mathematics and Mechanics of Modern Card Pathways. You want it?
Lexie: Sure.
She thought for a second and then added.
Lexie: Do you also have a book about card crafting?
LibraryTroll: Jameson Crafting Manual 2nd Edition. Do you want too?
Lexie: Yes.
LibraryTroll: First Book, 500 credits. Last book 1500 credits.
Lexie's eyes bugged out. She didn't expect them to be that expensive. From her experience, most books on the system were about 200 or fewer credits. But Troll didn't seem to appreciate her shock.
LibraryTroll: You buy or not? Quickly.
Lexie had a second to think about it. She definitely wanted the books but she didn't have the money for both of them. She had enough for the first book, thanks to her betting and saving, but definitely not the second. But she really wanted the second book.
Lexie: Can I get the first one and put the second on hold?
LibraryTroll: No hold.
Lexie sighed as her heart sank. But she had to try again.
Lexie: Please? I'll do anything.
Lexie almost regretted typing the last sentence but it was true. She was desperate.
LibraryTroll: Will hold for three weeks for 2,000 credits.
Shit. That was a 500-credit increase on a probably already overpriced book. She was getting fleeced! But she didn't have a choice she already knew. And it occurred to her distantly that this was probably who Uncle Max was referring to when he spoke about a greedy troll in the basement trying to charge him 1000 credits for a book. Lexie thought he was referring to an actual internet troll, not a literal one.
LibraryTroll: You buy or not? Quickly.
Lexie sighed.
Lexie: I'll buy.
LibraryTroll: Disconnecting Now. Send half payment to this number. Complete upon receipt. Go to post office for further instructions. Thank you for your purchase.
Lexie blinked at the words that appeared rapidly on her screen before LibraryTroll disconnected. It also warned her that the page would autodelete in 30 seconds so she needed to get the number down.
Lexie scrambled to record the number just as the page disappeared in front of her, taking her back to her usual system screen.
What on Earth was that? It was so bizarre.
She stared at the number. Should she send the money? Could she believe it was real? It was all so very sketchy though and she didn't know whether to trust it. Then again, they probably had to be sketchy given that they were distributing advanced books to people without a scholar ID.
How were they doing that? Was that part of the Undernet Xena spoke about?
She looked up LibraryTroll and found nothing about it on the NET. Which made her extra sketched out. Her sense of self-preservation battled with her curiosity. To do or not to do?
Lexie took a breath and sighed. She needed to be sure about this. It said for her to visit the post office for further instructions but which one? There was a single post office in Hovelton but it wasn't in use anymore, since most people delivered things by the system, except for larger packages. But maybe distributing via the system made it more likely they would get caught, so Troll used a physical system instead.
But why didn't he at least specify which post office?
She sighed and considered it again. If she was being taken for a ride, should she risk the 250? Would she regret it if she wasted that kind of money and found out that it was all a ruse?
Yeah, but if she didn't at least try and she missed this opportunity, she would hate herself even more.
So ultimately Lexie decided to give it a try. She sent the money to the account number hoping that she wasn't being scammed.
A few minutes later, she got a message from an unknown number for her to visit the post office and use the code C26794B on box 8.
Lexe did it the next day, bright and early after Aiden went to the hospital. The post office was a single unmanned building with cobwebs lining the entryway and no one behind an eerily still counter.
She had a moment where she hesitated, thinking maybe this was dangerous. But it probably wasn’t correct, since her Uncle Max used them all the time probably. Also the system wouldn’t have let her contact him if it was dangerous. Right?
Speaking of which, how did LibraryTroll manage to bypass the system checks to even chat with her in the first place? Did the system not know that it was illegally trading books?
“I am never doing this again,” Lexie told herself. Or at the very least, she should have come with security or something. This felt really dangerous.
But she’d already come this far. She couldn’t go home empty-handed.
She activated <Hustle and Shuffle>, then quickly picked her way through and went to the box, typing in the code.
It opened to reveal the book.
Instantly, she got a text that said Complete payment before leaving or else.
That sounded ominous. She glanced around searching to see if anyone was watching her but no one was. There was no one here.
Well, no one except LibraryTroll apparently.
Oh well, better not to risk it. She sent the rest of the payment, took the book, and left.
But despite how sketchy the whole thing was, Lexie later thought that it was one of the better things she'd ever done.
She uploaded the book to her inventory and immediately began reading it on her pad. It was quite thick and used a lot of terminology and formulas she didn’t understand. To save time, she decided to skip the things she didn't comprehend yet and follow the images until she found something at her level.
She soon found a chapter written by the lead developer of a nail artist's deck and the research detailed the woman’s development of the deck and how she used the deck to train young mages about pathways.
Lexie read through, noting the woman's calculations on the changing pathways of a certain deck and how she used different 'stops' on a single pathway to enact different effects; basically to change the color of the nail polish that the card gave.
Lexie had a feeling that these stops were related to the checkpoint sensors that triggered card shutdown. So the more she learned about them the better.
She also read about something called the Heisman cofactor, which determined the ideal distance between stops in a pathway, and also something else called the Kleinfelter Rule which stated that two stops on the pathway must be of less variance than points farther away from each other on the pathway. Therefore, by that theory, it should be easier to change a nail color from red to orange than to change it to blue.
The book recommended exercises so one could start to feel the distance between each Heisman stop, applying the Heisman coefficient to figure out the other numbers used for the distance calculation. With that and the formula, one might predict the core design of a simple card.
The idea excited Lexie more than she could stand.
She immediately began the exercises that the woman put at the end of the chapter for practice. She logged into her system store and bought the Nail Artist’s deck for fifty credits, happy that she hadn't used any of her Party Planner cards today so she could practice right away.
Lexie began activating but then she ran into her first snafu.
It would be difficult to practice these cards on herself. Almost all of them were effect cards and even the ability card seemed to come with an arm choreography that Lexie wasn't quite sure she would nail.
Which left one other option.
She went to her bedroom door and pulled it open.
“Dad!” She called out. “I need help!”
