NOVEL NEXT Cycle 22 (15)
Dear Diary:
Dragons are immune to Kawaii. Found that out today.
We got through the maze pretty fast, and thanks to Mika’s drawing we didn’t get lost. The next flight of stairs spiral down, leading to a big opening rather than a door. Lvl 97 is a big, grassy field, with a kobold village along the left side of the cavern. Apparently it usually has a shield over it, making it look like just more wall.
The kobolds really weren’t expecting us. The first of the players should be here in maybe a week at earliest, so they were just doing normal kobold things. Playing, talking, building, cooking. Not one of them had armor on or was holding a weapon. They didn’t know what to do when we showed up, so the dragon himself came to talk to us.
The dragon’s current name is Bonecrusher the Black, but he used to be a mechanic from Ohio named Lewis, and told us to call him that. He’s a cool guy.
We told him that we were just passing through, didn’t want to hurt anyone. Lewis said that he understood what we were doing, but there was such a thing as professional pride. The kobolds agreed, and not just because he’s a dragon and is in charge. None of them were really ok with letting us waltz through their floor like we owned it.
In the end, we made a deal. If we could, as a group, beat the level once, they’d let us through after that without fighting. To me that sounds pretty fair. They’re defending their floor, like they’re supposed to, but as soon as we win, they’ll know we can win, and don’t want to keep on being slaughtered after that.
The only thing is, beating that level is going to be stupid hard. Like, there are two hundred kobolds to get through, and then we get to Lewis.
Aya straight up thinks we can’t do it. We all more or less agree, since as soon as we decided to fight Lewis one-shot tpk’d us. It’ll take some time to be strong enough to beat them.
We’re going down tomorrow to see exactly how underpowered we are, and judge how much we need to level up our fighting and magic. We’ll also let them know that we won’t be coming back for a while.
Meanwhile, my marble Mimo won a race! Finally! It doesn’t affect the standings all that much, but it feels nice to win. Once this tournament is over, I’ll have to set him aside to make sure I never accidentally use him again. A part of me knows that this is just a marble, and is exactly the same as the other couple thousand marbles I own. But in my imagination, this marble is Mimo, who must have taken steroids or something to win the prelims, and is now showing himself to be a slow, lazy marble with barely any drive to win.
I’m still trying to figure out how to get a breakfast menu. We can’t exactly call the Admin and be like “yo, give me waffles”, but if enough people want something it usually pops into existence. Like these notebooks. And pizza.
I might have Mika draw me up a poster asking players to think long and hard about the Waffle House menu.
Things to think about.
Goodnight, dungeon!
