Gerik moved deeper into the forest and I followed behind, making sure I didn’t become lost and also trying to make sure I didn’t step on his heels, which would’ve been embarrassing.

  We soon stood before a cave mouth at the bottom of a small cliff looming thirty feet above us. The cliff was of exposed rock, some thick veiny stone with roots intertwining near the top, and massive trees perched precariously above. Burning torches had been placed to either side of a cave entrance that quickly descended into unknowable depths. The entrance was large enough to drive a cement truck through, if you happened to own a cement truck and weren’t very smart.

  “Do you know what a dungeon is?” Gerik asked as we approached the entrance, where the fallen leaves and the forest loam gave way to broken rocks and hard ground. I noted a broken sword amidst the rocks. A few bones. A length of frayed rope and a rotting wooden crate.

  “Molly and Fridu said something about dungeons,” I offered. Gerik was about to say something in reply, but then more of those floating neon words appeared in the cave’s entrance.

  Cordvale Dungeon

  Levels 1-5 (Dungeon Boss 8)

  Giant Beetles: Kobolds: Ghouls

  Fangflies: Baneticks: Sprites:

  Skeletons: Curseworms: Beekeeper Spirits

  Treasure type: Low

  “How the hell?” Gerik asked, looking to the words and then to me.

  “What?” I asked. “Something wrong?” This was the most disturbed I’d seen Gerik.

  “The dungeon listing?” he questioned, poking at the words with his sword. I couldn’t help but notice how steady he could hold a sword. He had strong wrists. But I was nervous about his confusion. What was wrong with the dungeon? Well, other than all the weird monsters it listed. Were we really going to fight all of those? What the hell was a fangfly, anyway? A curseworm? A beekeeper spirit?

  “Do you have Cedric’s See-All Stone with you?” Gerik asked. “Did Molly let you borrow it? Ah, that must be it.” He calmed down.

  “No,” I said. Gerik became anxious again.

  “Then how are you making it do that?” he asked. Once again he slowly sliced his sword though the words, this time in a more accusatory manner.

  “I’m the one making it do that?” I asked.

  “Well, it isn’t me!” Gerik said. “Do I look like I could do that?” As he spoke, I really studied him, looking to him in the light cast by the torches to either side of the cave, and then suddenly there were more of the floating words, this time hovering a few feet away.

  Gerik of the Darkness

  Class: Rogue  Level: 9  Health points: 97

  Race: Human  Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

  Strength: 14 Intelligence: 14 Dexterity: 16

  Charisma: 10 Constitution: 16

  Languages: Common, Thieves Cant, Elven, English,

  Special Abilities: +2 against ghouls, Collect Darkness,

  Absorb Sound, Intimidate (3x per day)

  Magic Items: +2 ring, Bag of Consumables, Cheese Hunk,

  +1 Sword of Blood (becomes +3 when stained with

  fresh blood of two or more foes)

  “The hell?” Gerik gasped. “You’ve read me, too? This is more than odd, Josh of Apartment 3B. This is steep magics, boy. You clearly have an innate ability to divine the stats of people and objects. No wonder Molly thinks you’d be useful. Why, if nothing else, you’ll be handy in taverns and towns. People’ll pay a coin or two to have their stats exposed. Or, like as not, to avoid having them exposed. Hmm. Can you do yourself?”

  “Do… myself? You mean masturbate?”

  “What?” Gerik took a step back.

  “Sorry! Uh, my sister Binsa. That’s what she calls masturbating. Doing yourself. I, uh, thought that was what you meant. Not thinking real straight, here, Gerik. You meant, can I bring up my own stats, right? I don’t think so.”

  “Try.”

  “Uh. Okay.” I concentrated, but I didn’t know how to concentrate, so I mostly just felt stupid.

  Until my stats appeared.

  Josh Hester

  Class: Open  Level: 0  Health points: 4

  Race: Human  Alignment: Neutral Good

  Strength: 10 Intelligence: 11 Dexterity: 10

  Charisma: 10 Constitution: 11

  Languages: English Special Abilities: Stat Divination

  Magic Items: None

  “There!” Gerik said, pointing his sword to my stats. “Stat Divination? I’ve never seen that ability before.”

  “It wasn’t there before,” I said. “This is new.” Together, Gerik and I fell into silence, staring at the various floating stats, lost in our own thoughts. A wind swirled in mouth of the cave, picking up dust and a few tattered scraps of parchment. A hollow, moaning sound came from deeper inside the cave. I hoped it was just the echo of the wind.

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  There were noises from the woods. Something large was moving through the brush, and I shivered when I heard the high trilling of what I now knew to be a deathshrike. The cave smelled of broken stone, wetness, and of the scent of a recent campfire somebody had built just inside the mouth of the cave and never properly extinguished. In the skies above, a storm was building. If it really broke loose, the cave would be our only shelter. It was not a prospect that pleased me.

  “This is strange,” Gerik said, looking at my stats, but his unnerving calm had returned. He nodded as if strange things were proper. “The only way anyone’s ever been able to uncover stats is with high magics, or with rare objects such as Molly’s stone.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Another mystery, then,” Gerik said. “Such as your ‘open’ class, there.” He slid his sword through my stats again. The words were like smoke, reforming once the blade had passed. Gerik gave a shrug of his own and turned to the mouth of the cave.

  “Anyway, let’s go kill things,” he said, walking inside.

  “Or get killed, ourselves,” he added, with his voice echoing lively from the darkness, and with his boots silent on the broken stones.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Sections of the dungeon were of rough-hewn rock, as if somebody had chiseled their way through the mountain. Other tunnels were natural formations, opening into irregular caverns.

  There were also lengths of dusty hallways with finely worked stone, so that I could almost believe I was in a castle, complete with ancient tapestries hanging from the walls. And there were always lights, but never enough. Whether they were glowing stones, torches set into the walls with sconces, or the flickering flames of oil lamps hanging from chains, I was always straining to see.

  Regardless of what type of hall or tunnel in which we found ourselves, the air smelled of dust, rock, and rotted wood. At one point we crossed an underground stream, navigating it with the aid of stalactites that hung from the cavern’s roof, low enough that they were nearly touching the water, making our crossing not unlike slipping through an irregularly spaced fence.

  We had our first fight when a skeleton stepped out from a recess brandishing an ancient copper sword. Bits of cloth hung from its cracked bones, which were caked with dust that spilled away with each of the skeleton’s tremoring steps. Its teeth chattered like an old typewriter.

  “All yours,” Gerik said, stepping back.

  “What? Fuck no.”

  “Now’s the time for valor,” Gerik assured me.

  “It’s not,” I argued. The skeleton advanced, closing the thirty-foot gap between us. It swung the sword in an experimental fashion, slashing at the air. A rib broke away and clattered to the floor with a sound like rolling dice. Up close, the skeleton’s bones were yellow and gray, with bits of meat adhered like ancient patches of leather.

  “Sometimes they bite,” Gerik said, in a helpful voice.

  “Fucking kill it, please?” I asked Gerik, in a hopeful voice.

  “Try your ability where you read its stats,” Gerik said. “I’m curious.” The skeleton was now no more than ten feet away, and the man wanted me to do parlor tricks.

  “I’m busy!” I shouted, but the thought had entered my head, so I found myself wondering about the skeleton’s stats, and they appeared.

  Skeleton (lower)

  Level: 1  Health points: 5

  Attack Class: 1  Defense Class: 1 (brittle against bludgeon)

  Attack Damage: 1d4-1

  “Good,” Gerik said. “Your spell worked.” He was calmly dodging the skeleton as it swung its sword for his face, stepping just far enough back for the blade to pass inches from his unconcerned nose.

  “I can’t cast spells!” I argued like an idiot, because I should’ve been more focused on the issue at hand, namely the undead creature trying to murder me.

  “Are you carrying a mace?” Gerik asked.

  “What? No! Where do you think I could be hiding a mace?”

  “Ah, too bad. A skeleton like this, one good crack on his skull and he’d be nothing but broken pottery.”

  I had to do something quick. The skeleton was pressing its attack on Gerik, but Gerik was easily dodging the sweeps of its blade, and though I doubted there was much intelligence in the pinpricks of light coming from the skeleton’s eye sockets, I could tell it was getting frustrated and thinking about easier prey, meaning me, Josh “Easy Prey” Hester. I had a sudden image of myself as that stumbling newborn antelope you always see in nature documentaries, the one being cut from the herd by a pack of hungry lions.

  “Shit shit shit,” I said, stepping forward to slash at the skeleton’s sword arm. To my surprise, my attack connected. A crack appeared in the forearm. The skeleton swiveled to face me, with a brighter flare of light from its eye sockets.

  “Ahh shit shit shit,” I said. The skeleton raised its sword high and then, just as it reversed directions for a slash that would’ve lopped off my head, the bones of its forearm snapped in two, bursting apart in a spray of dust, cracking in half where I’d struck. The arm and the sword fell to the hallway floor. The skeleton and I considered this for a moment. Gerik laughed.

  The skeleton went to pick up his sword, wrapping its skeletal fingers around the hilt, and I panicked and kicked out with my combat boot, smashing the skeleton’s head against the side of the wall, crushing it between hard stone and the very finest “Made in China” boot my ex-girlfriend had been able to afford.

  The skeleton shuddered, then turned to a pile of dust with a few scattered splinters of bone.

  “Well done!” Gerik exclaimed, sifting through the skeleton’s scant remains with the tip of his sword. He uncovered a sparkle of light that floated up into the air like a miniature fireworks display, and became words.

  +32 Experience Points

  I felt a warm tingle flood through my body. I heard a loud buzzing. The tingling sensation was like walking from cool shade into warm sunlight, combined with that feeling of drinking something and then tracking its course through your body, but in this case it started in my chest and spread everywhere. The buzzing sound was kind of irritating. I wondered if it was something that happened every time a monster was defeated, and with that thought I realized that I’d now beaten two monsters, and didn’t that mean something? Didn’t that mean that—?

  “Fangflies,” Gerik said.

  “What?”

  “Can’t you hear them? That damn buzz. Fangflies. True assholes. Get ready. Let’s pray it’s not a full swarm.”

  The hum and the buzz in the underground hall increased. There were distracting flickers of flame from the torches and the oil lamps, creating fluttering shadows. Fat beads of sweat trickled down my forehead and across my cheeks, with others stinging into my eyes. I clutched at my dagger and waited, chest heaving and breath short, as the buzz grew ever louder.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-