The faint blue light illuninated his face in the dim attic. His fingers hovered above the mechanical keyboard, clicking out a rhythm that gradually increased tempo as he navigated the odd tactile response. It felt clumsy next to the smooth projection interface of a manaphone, but it… worked, and that was all that mattered.
System help me, Deacon complained as he harshly double-tapped the sticky spacebar. If I find this Palmer guy…
Lines of directory paths, compressed folders, and old system logs scrolled by as he navigated deeper into the laptop's root files. Most of it was mundane: maintenance schedules, security shift rotations, software updates for departments that no longer existed. But a few folders were labeled in red text, locked behind encryption: "OPS_CMD," "GRID_CONTROL," "SHIELD_RELAYS."
What the fuck does any of this even mean? Deacon groaned as another command prompt appeared on the laptop screen. What the hell is a cmd? Why are there thousands of them?
He leaned forward, tapping a key to open a zipped folder only for a request for a password to access the file – the system password did not work for it. "Come on… there's gotta be something in here."
The floor beside him creaked as Jass shifted in her sleep nearby, bundled beneath the salvaged cloak, and hidden from sight by a couple of crates. While the storm had long since passed, the air still smelled faintly of scorched ozone and dust.
He paused as an old memory surfaced, his centaur Floor Instructor of six years, Mr. Pholous. The instructor's voice echoed in his mind:
"There are no useless items given on a Floor. If it's there, it has a purpose. Maybe not now, maybe not for you, but for the Floor? Absolutely."
Mr. Pholous's voice rang in his head, stern and certain, as it had so many times during lectures. But right now, it only made the frustration burn hotter behind Deacon's eyes.
The pulsing vein on his forehead throbbed visibly as the screen flashed back another error.
Incorrect Password. Try Again.
Deacon's jaw clenched. His fingers twitched over the keyboard.
Another error.
Incorrect Password. Try Again.
Again.
Incorrect Password. Try Again.
"Fuck this."
With a sharp breath through his nose, Deacon slammed his newly healed right fist onto the center of the keyboard. Thirteen plastic buttons were pressed, twelve dots appeared in the password terminal in front of him, and the screen flickered, and just as he went to pull his hand back, he noticed something:
Access Granted. Welcome Nathan Palmer!
His brow shot up.
"…Huh?"
The laptop chirped quietly, and a series of directories opened up one by one, unfolding like some tired old machine just now remembering how to do its job.
Deacon blinked, still hovering over the cracked casing. "No shot…"
The files now sprawled before him, uncompressed folders, logs, half-corrupted directories with names like GRID_CONTROL, SECURITY_OVERRIDES, and CITY_CORE_MAPS. And buried within them, a dated but functional file: instructions on rebooting the city's grid from six scattered terminals, and only two of which were listed as currently reachable.
Deacon leaned back and let out a slow, disbelieving laugh. "Is this why this Laptop was sent to the IT Department?"
Deacon adjusted his posture against the crate, legs stretched out across the dusty attic floor, the faint glow of the laptop screen lighting his face in pale blue. Both terminals were outlined on the schematics, one in a substation twenty blocks south, the other inside a transit control hub beneath the old government center that was on the other side of the city.
Either one, the notes claimed, would be enough to bring the city's electrical grid back online.
He scrolled through another screen, his fingers greasy from the salted chips he'd snagged from the food bundle behind him. The instructions were technical, but not indecipherable, at least until he hit a line that made him pause.
"Connect the user interface to the grid access point via Ethernet cable for handshake protocol initiation, and it will open a prompt for you to choose if you wish for the power to turn on."
He frowned. "Ethernet cable…?"
What the hell is that?
He muttered, chewing another salted chip. "Not a single mention of mana compatibility…"
Behind him, the crate creaked slightly. A moment later, a familiar voice rasped through the quiet:
"So… you figure out where we're headed next, Deke?"
Deacon turned just enough to see Jass rubbing her eyes with the back of one hand while reaching lazily for the granola bars he'd placed atop the crate beside her before she'd passed out. She looked a bit tired even after her five hour nap, but her wounds were now fully healed and armor repaired.
He smirked. "Morning. Slept like a corpse, huh?"
Jass took a loud bite out of the bar. "Damn right. I didn't sleep at all the night before we got our Classes, Esmerelda and I were up talking the whole night."
Deacon nodded toward the screen. "We've got two options to reboot the grid. Either a substation down south or a control hub beneath the old government building on the other side of the city."
Jass chewed, swallowed, and wiped crumbs off her chin. "You don't look excited."
"I'm not." He tapped the screen again, highlighting the line about the Ethernet cable. "Because I need one of these first. Whatever the hell it is."
She leaned forward, squinting. "Ethernet? Isn't that the thing the old tech guys used to plug stuff into flat screens and consoles? Like, old world tech?"
Deacon raised an eyebrow. "You know what it is?"
"Yeah, Jonah collects anything on old tech that people bring back from the Floors that they clear. I've seen a few cables with that name on it… They have rectangular heads, flat…rubbery coating… I think."
Deacon's shoulders sagged with exaggerated relief. "I take back all the shit I sent your brother about his hoard of… ah, stuff."
He snapped the laptop shut, grabbed the now-empty chip bag, and tossed it back in the crate. "Eat up. Once you're good to move, we'll head to the substation twenty blocks south of here."
She raised a brow, licking the leftover peanut butter off her thumb. "For this cable?"
"For us to turn on the electrical grid of the city… assuming that it is a worksite for this stuff, there should be a couple of Ethernet cables… I think."
"I guess," Jass shrugged. "Worst case, we'll just set everything up, and if we see a computer store, we can grab an Ethernet cable from there."
Deacon's brows furrowed. "What's a computer store? And why would an Ethernet be there?"
***
The streets of the ruined city of Seattle were filled with the groaning, clicking, and scuttering of mutant humans and beasts. Weeds pushed themselves through the cracked webs across the concrete.
Deacon drove his blade into the back of a Level 2 Mutated Hound, a hunched, hairless dog-thing with far too many teeth and eyes. Its body collapsed with a wet thud atop the concrete.
*[Mutant Hound Lv 2] has been slain – XP has been given.*
Beside him, Jass twirled her glaive in a wide arc and took the arm off a stumbling, fungus-riddled human mutant. She followed up with a clean stab to the chest, sending it crumpling to the cracked pavement.
They moved in tandem.
"What do your side objective or objectives consist of for this Floor?" Deacon asked, nudging a corpse with his boot before stepping over it.
"Nothing out of the ordinary," Jass replied, squinting her eyes as she attempted to recall what her Quest Panel said from when she first arrived. "Collect samples from four mutated species, which I'm already halfway done with, and destroy five Mutant Nests, which I haven't found a single one of yet. You?"
"Oof." He gave her a look as he took out his second Status Page and pressed the Quest Panel tab. "You got two?"
"Mine is to collect 10 Elite Mutant Beastcores," Deacon read aloud before passing it to her.
"Ah crap," Jass replied as she handed his still smoldering parchment. "I killed this yellow, toxic slime on Day One and it was a level 3 Elite, it literally jumped at me the moment I spawned in. I don't have its core because, you know, in order to kill a slime you have to destroy its core."
"That early?" Deacon questioned, pocketing his Status page and turning to look at Jass. "I fought one a couple hours into Day One, something called a skinwalker, it was a level 6 Elite."
"What's a skinwalker?" Jass asked, her eyebrows scrunched in confusion as she tried to recall the monsters, beasts, and various other races they covered while in the Academy.
"Beats me," Deacon shrugged. "I don't even know what they normally look like with all the mutations on them. All I know is that it's fast and its body could morph into slime like tendrils and those tendrils can be as hard as steel and transform into things like a blade or a dog's head."
"Wait, you said it was a level 6?" Jass looked taken aback at his words as she sliced off the head of a mutant human that lunged at her legs. Noticing his nod, she looked even more befuddled. " What's a level 6 even doing on Day One? An Elite at that."
"Shouldn't our Floor One fit in the genre of protecting a town or a large village? The same as the past twenty-seven years?"
"Yeah, I agree," Jass replied, adjusting the grip on her glaive as she sidestepped a pile of mutant bones. "New Floor genres only get added to the pool every thirty years. We're still three years away from that."
"Maybe it was always in the pool, but no one's rolled it until now?" Deacon offered.
Jass shrugged. "I guess."
But just as she opened her mouth to continue, a sharp voice cut through the silence of the street.
"Oi! Drop your gear. Now!"
Both Deacon and Jass turned in sync.
[Human Lv 3]
A fellow cadet stood about twenty meters away. His clothes were torn, a mix of academy uniform and scavenged gear strapped over in an almost theatrical mess. His eyes locked on the laptop in Deacon's left hand and a pouch that was stuffed to the brim with snack bars, wild and hungry.
"You deaf?" the cadet snapped, stepping forward with a spiked pipe slung over his shoulder. "I said drop your shit. You hand it over, and maybe I won't bash your skull."
Deacon exchanged a glance with Jass, his brow raised in silent disbelief. Jass just blinked at the guy, more annoyed than alarmed. She'd been threatened now by no more than five people in the span of 24 hours.
Deacon took a single step forward, voice flat. "How about you fuck off instead?"
That made the guy's grin drop. He pointed the pipe at them, chest puffing out.
"Take another step, and I swear to all the gods above and below, I'll beat the shit outta you then Imma bite your dick off!"
Silence.
Even the groaning and clicking of the mutants around them seemed to have paused.
Jass stared. Deacon's mouth hung open slightly. They just… looked at him.
"…What?" Deacon finally said, his brain supposedly doing a full reset. "I… Uh…"
"I, ugh, what?" the guy mocked. "Drop your gear and food! Else I'm gonna bite your dick off!"
"…Why would you fighting me involve your mouth around my junk?" Deacon said as Jass turned her head to the side and covered as much of her face as she could with her arm, her shoulders shaking as she tried to muffle her laughter.
"Like you could have said you were going to rip it off or crush it or, uh, I don't know anything other than what you just said."
Jass officially gave up as she howled with laughter, unable to stop herself.
The cadet's face flushed red, a vein bulging near his temple as he gripped the pipe tighter. "Shut up! You think I won't do it? You think this is a joke!"
Deacon raised both hands, one still loosely holding the laptop. "No, no, we fully believe you. That's the problem."
Jass doubled over now, actually using her glaive for support, wheezing between laughs. "Oh, System," she choked out, "I'm gonna die from laughter before the Floor Boss gets me."
"Alright, alright," Deacon said, turning back to the would-be bandit with a tired expression. "Look. I'm going to give you one more chance to leave before I let her actually hurt you. And that's being generous, considering you just threatened to introduce your mouth to my – well, yeah."
The cadet twitched.
"Huh? You two think I'm scared of you? Of her?" he snarled, waving the pipe around like it weighed nothing. "You're just some lucky spawn hogging loot! I've been in ten fights since we landed and I lived through all of 'em!"
Deacon took one slow step forward, and gesturing for the guy to calm down. "If that's the case then you really should've learned something by now."
The guy charged at the both of them.
Or at least tried to.
Jass, recovering just enough, flicked her glaive out with casual grace and slammed the blunt end into his shin mid-sprint. There was a meaty crack, followed by a scream as he spun mid-air and landed flat on his face.
"Should I be worried how satisfying that looked for you?" Deacon asked as he looked at Jass.
She grinned. "Probably."
The guy rolled over, clutching his leg. "F-Fuck you! I'll– !"
Jass jabbed her glaive down next to his head with a solid thunk into the pavement before smacking the hilt of her glaive to the side of his head, knocking him unconscious.
"Bite it off, yeah, yeah, we know," she chuckled.