carl@fire

"Gonna put you down for a minute, big guy," he said to the axe as he set it down against the wall with its head on the gr—

"Do not place me upside down."

This was the first time he'd intentionally played an incredibly immersive virtual reality game to do anything more than fish. That was a fact. It was not, however, his first time experiencing a fantasy setting. He'd read books, he'd watched movies, he'd seen television series, and he'd even played a number of games in the genre. As a result, when he heard a man's voice speaking to him with the same slight accent that Ir'alith spoke with while standing in a cave where the only objects were a box full of marbles, a corpse, and an axe that had an actual, moving eyeball on it, Carl reacted with the expected amount of weariness and non-surprise that might be expected from encountering yet another talking weapon.

"AHHH!" Carl shouted, leaping back in surprise when the axe suddenly talked to him.

The force of his jump sent him flying backwards and into the opposite wall of the cave, where he sank some distance into the stone. He remained still for a moment, trying to come to terms with the events of the previous few seconds. Is this… He moved his arm experimentally with what he judged to be an appropriate amount of force, finding that the stone was frustratingly soft. You've gotta be kidding me, Roger.

Carl stood up and trudged back through the rock wall of the cave, feeling his annoyance growing with each step. So it wasn't just the noob zone? Do we even have QA? When he reached the cave again, he saw that there was a small crater where he'd been standing, no doubt from where he had exerted a small amount of force on the stupidly-soft rock in the course of his jump.

"I apologize if I surprised you," the axe said, somehow managing to sound slightly condescending.

Carl scowled at the eye, which he now felt was looking a little smug. "No," he said, not wanting to be ridiculed by an axe, "I wasn't surprised. Just… Testing out the structural integrity of the cave here."

"How wise," the axe muttered sarcastically, clearly seeing through his lie.

"What are you, anyway?" Carl asked as he closed back in on the axe and marble-box. Alright, this has to be an NPC. I don't care how much we love that SWE stuff, there's just no way—

"I am Seth'tith, father of Ir'alith," the axe said in an imperious tone.

Carl put a hand to his face, recalling the hurried statement she'd made about her father helping with his dungeoneering. "You're her father," he said. How is this a thing.

"I am," Seth'tith, Ir'alith's dad, who was apparently playing the game as a freaking item, confirmed.

"Great," Carl said, rolling his eyes. I don't care what anyone says, this is too far.

"You may think yourself secure in your relationship with my daughter because of who you are, but I have yet to give my approval."

Is that like, he doesn't want us to be friends because I work for Fire? What the heck, man. I've heard of overprotective, but this is insane. He's playing as her weapon just to keep tabs on her? Jesus, growing up in that household must've been torture. She's older than me now and he's still—Well, I guess that also explains why she was so happy to get it back… Maybe she likes having him around? Whatever, not gonna let it bother me. Maybe he'll be a cool guy once I get to know him. "Yeah, okay," Carl said. He bent down to check out the box of dungeon cores, which were also a thing. There's a ton of these things. "Do I just use one of these, or do I just take a handful, or—"

"One is sufficient," Ir'alith's dad cut in. "It surprises me that you are unaware of their function."

"Hey, it's not like I asked around about dungeon cores before I logged in," Carl snapped. "There's a ton of these things! How am I supposed to figure out which one to use?"

"I…" The more overprotective father of the two hesitated. "I had heard that they possess voices," he said slowly.

"Voices?" Carl frowned. Then another idea came to him and he stared at the box of… No way. These can't be players. If these freaking things aren't NPCs then I'm just gonna move myself somewhere random. I can't even… He reached down and pic…

The dungeon core failed to move when he grabbed it between his fingers, so he put more fingers on it and pick…

The large, purple-glowing marble he'd put his fingers around wouldn't budge no matter how he tugged at it.

"C'mon," Carl said in annoyance, grabbing at another one, which similarly didn't budge and also seemed vaguely greasy in some hard-to-define way.

"Are you having difficulty?" asked Seth'tith.

"No," Carl huffed, not wanting his high-level friend's dad to know that he couldn't even pick up a freaking in-game marble. "Inspect," he murmured.

A status window appeared.

Name: Strongest Fuckin' Core of All Time

Durability: ∞

Required Level: 1200

Required Strength: 200,000

Required Intelligence: 1

Description: Bruh.

Carl frowned more deeply and dismissed the window. He touched another one, greenish this time, and inspected it.

Name: Authoritative Core

Durability: ∞

Required Level: 2000

Required Strength: 100,000

Required Intelligence: 300,000

Required Wisdom: 300,000

Description: I know everything.

Carl was beginning to get an idea of why he was unable to pick any of these up. He dismissed the status window, then touched one more dungeon core and inspected it.

Name: Peerless Core

Durability: ∞

Required Level: 5000

Required Strength: 500,000

Required Agility: 500,000

Required Stamina:  500,000

Required Intelligence: 500,000

Required Wisdom: 500,000

Description: I shall shatter the heavens.

Carl sighed and dismissed the window. Yup, this is some kinda insane endgame thing. Alright, fine. Fine. I'll try it. But if this isn't the coolest thing ever, Roger—or Greg, or whoever's idea this was—I'm gonna find you, and I'm gonna write a very polite suggestion that you make it better considering how much time people are gonna have to put into leveling in order to actually try this stuff.

"Keyboard," he called at a normal volume, reasoning that Ir'alith's dad had already heard by now that… Huh, I inspected him earlier? I guess he's being treated fully as an item by the game? Carl rubbed his beard. I bet that was pretty hard to code.

After musing on the subject for another moment, Carl executed a selection for his character's current stats using a read-only database connection and piped the output into a file for later use. Then he entered his new sixty four character password to gain dbadmin privileges and began composing an update command for his character. Don't know which one of these cores I want, so I'm gonna have to brute force it. I'll set it back after, and it's not like anyone else is gonna be able to find my dungeon, so no harm there. But what to… Don't wanna have to keep doing this, that's for sure. The numbers seem pretty wacky. Can people even get these kinds of stats?

Feeling a sense of growing fatigue at the prospect of stats and numbers, Carl keyed in a set of values that he figured he probably wouldn't have to change, then triple-checked the command and executed it, closing out of the database prompt and its shell once it returned success. He fired up another shell and checked his…

"Inspect self," Carl muttered. He waited a moment, looking around, but nothing happened. Gah, I gotta figure this out at some point. He executed another database query using a read-only connection to check his character's stats.

Name: Carl

Level: 1,000,000

Health: 600

Strength: 10,000,000

Agility: 10,000,000

Stamina:  10,000,000

Intelligence: 10,000,000

Wisdom: 10,000,000

Look, it's just for a little while. Nobody else is gonna be digging around down in wherever the heck I am. This is Roger's fault anyway for making it possible. Why the heck is the DB using sixty four-bit uints for all these values? Nobody's ever gonna get that high. He logged out of his shells, causing his keyboard to disappear. Then he…

Carl paused. This is gonna take a while isn't it. "Inventory." He scrolled through the pages until he reached the one he wanted. "Hm." He considered how he was going to accomplish what he was attempting for a moment, then decided to just pull the comfortable recliner he'd taken from the auction house right out.

The chair was surprisingly light in his hands, and he set it carefully on the uneven floor of the cave. Next, he bent down and picked up the box of cores and sank back into the chair before leaning back to recline. "Now we're talking," he said to himself as he grabbed again the so-called Strongest Fuckin' Core of All Time and lifted it into his hand.

"Bruh, I'm tellin' you, pick me," came the obviously-not-normally-this-deep voice of a young-sounding man. "All-a these other fuckin' cores, they don't got shit on me. My traps are so fuckin' swole I can't even wear normal shirts anymore."

Carl blinked. "You're…a dungeon core?" he asked.

"You fuckin' serious right now?" the core demanded. "Bruh, I'm the best fuckin' bludgeon gore of all time!"

Carl grimaced. "I think you meant dungeon core?"

"Bruh, why you gotta repeat me like that?"

Carl sighed and threw the annoying core into the blank page he'd flipped to in his inventory. He stared at the load of cores remaining in the box on his lap. "This is really gonna take a while."

"That one spoke oddly," called Seth'tith. "Perhaps it was damaged over time."

"Yeah, maybe," Carl grumbled.