Michelle Takoyaki continued to rent a cheap little apartment, a ways northwest of the Pearland entrance that was no longer a Dungeon, exactly. Cheap in one way, at least – she wasn't exactly paying a cut rate for the place, as she was reminded every time she checked her bank. The place was loud, and she was close enough to major roads to hear more than a little bit of honking and engine noise. The landlord liked to point out how the suburban sprawl gave her plenty of opportunities for food and shopping... but that wasn't what most Dungeoneers focused on anymore.

  Not just because of the Dungeons, either.

  Michelle drove a beater mostly by choice, definitely not because she couldn't afford better – Dungeoneers could easily get a decent windfall from even low-level Dungeons, and with the death rates, there were an alarming number of unclaimed and reclaimed cars in the world. Even with the massive inflation that the Dungeons had brought, you could get a good car for reasonable money. But her shitty Honda Civic didn't attract attention, and it still ran fine, with limited maintenance. Of course, she knew that with her stats, she could get in a pretty nasty car wreck and walk away, and she could find Dungeoneer ways to travel if she really wanted... but she still drove, and even buckled her safety belt, not just to silence the alarm. No matter what her mind might say, it felt... stupid to ignore all the old ways, the ones she'd grown up with. Especially the things that had always been about safety, and doing things the right way.

  Speaking of which, she should call her mother. Though she'd... probably not talk about... everything. The familiar and uncertain dread of having to defend her life and choices, and having to rehash the same dumb arguments again, settled deep in her stomach like bad Chinese food... but she would still call. She had to, with Naomi gone.

  Michelle noted the new road closure ahead with little more than a gaunt acceptance. She took the next cross-street instead, trying hard to do no more than simply glance at the torn up road and destroyed diner, one she'd only been to once, as close as it was. It had been happening more and more, not just here, not just overseas, but apparently everywhere; Dungeoneer fights outside of a Dungeon had for years been a taboo, helped along because raiding Dungeons was so much better than stealing from flat-worlders. And because a lot of early, powerful Dungeoneers had stood up and sided with public order, promising to help police and the military tackle problem people. And because Priestesses could tell when you lied. And because killing anything but a Dungeon monster made you Blooded, and Administrators would know that when you entered their territory.

  That last one was helped a lot by Administrator Trinity, who set up governed sanctuaries outside all of their portals. Local police only need drag suspects through the area, and Trinity would mark them if they were blooded... or enslaved, which was its own terrifying thing.

  But recently, enough Dungeoneers were absent from their homes, and had enough shit that one Inventory couldn't hold it all, so that burglary had started to spike. Enough people were genuine powerhouses that it was hard to fear the military. And enough people were fed up with the federal government that there were fewer "patriots" on patrol. Vigilantes, yes, but those fights rarely ended up with long-term prison sentences, one way or another. Also, too many vigilantes tended to hold back, thinking themselves to be some kind of modern superhero. Too many had disappeared, often with no explanation.

  There were no corpses with Dungeoneers. Either they could be brought back, or they were simply gone.

  Michelle's thoughts swam slowly through a half dozen topics as she drove. Her mind was too thick to move quickly, and too restless to settle. As she finally turned onto her street, and then into her apartment's lot, she was relieved to find it wasn't blown up or broken into – not because she had anything there worth stealing. She hadn't done enough Dungeoneering to accumulate too much stuff, and she was alright selling the extra anyway. It was just miserable trying to find another open apartment with decent rates and a landlord who wasn't too dickish.

  Michelle sighed as she threw the Civic into park and let her head rest on the steering wheel for what felt like a lot longer than just a moment, before popping open the door and getting out. She caught the landlord's window blinds flutter closed as she turned towards the stairs, not that Michelle blamed the woman for snooping. She paused just long enough to make sure that she wasn't rushing outside to deliver some kind of bad news, then marched up to her apartment, her Dungeon boots quiet despite the metal treads.

  Her apartment was almost vacant, with just a couch and an empty TV stand in the living room until she started pulling things out of her Inventory. She didn't bother unloading most of her stuff, of course, since she'd be putting it away again soon enough. Some of it had been spending more and more time in storage, and she was coming to realize just how little of that shit she cared about. Needing to actually choose to pull it out every time she came back from a Dungeon made that point clearer month by month.

  The last thing she pulled out was her cell phone, and she sat down on the couch, already anxious, though a small part of her already knew that the moment she heard her mother's voice, she'd feel terrible about being anything other than happy and loving. Her fingers found the right buttons all the same, and the phone only rang a couple times before it was picked up.

  "Michelle!" She felt her heart clench and a small smile formed on her lips. "I am glad to hear from you. You're done in the Dungeons?"

  "For now," Michelle agreed, or maybe deflected. Her mother had asked it that way since the beginning, but it felt different since Naomi... was gone. Like her mother was always hoping that she would march off to one of Trinity's sanctuaries and remove her Dungeoneer core for good, as though she'd be any safer without it. Any safer once she was stuck at a lower level, never getting any stronger. "How are you doing, mama?"

  "I'm fine, I'm fine," her mother said, in the tone of voice that told her nothing. "Your uncle Stuart came around for dinner two nights ago, and we spent some time talking about your father when he was younger. About the adventures we had when we were young, and when all you kids were growing up. He said to say hello, of course. From him, and from Stewie."

  "I'm glad he's doing okay." Though that wasn't exactly what she had said, and she knew her mother heard the thought in her voice.

  "He's fine, he's fine. Even with Amy in the hospital again, he's keeping his spirits up. You know about that, right? That was before you went out?"

  "Yes, mom."

  "I don't know why these Dungeon people can't do more about the state of modern medicine..."

  Michelle leaned back in the couch and committed to waiting out another of her mother's rants. In theory, Aunt Amy could have ducked into a Dungeon, gotten a Dungeoneer Class really quickly, and that would have cured her thyroid cancer – and she could have gone right to Trinity and had the class torn back out, becoming human again... in theory. But it wasn't what she wanted, or what Uncle Stuart wanted, and the Administrators, and even the Dungeon Gods, apparently didn't want to replace the entire world's medicine with some kind of weird Dungeon stuff.

  Which was probably good, except when it wasn't. And maybe Aunt Amy would have turned down a weird Dungeon cancer cure, too. She was a stiff-backed white woman with a lot of pride, Christian even after the Dungeon Gods had come around. A Protestant, though, so she wasn't sure what to think about Administrator Trinity siding with the Vatican and trying to centralize the Church again. It had taken the woman time to get over Dad marrying into an Asian family, but she had.

  Americans were weird. She knew she was American too, third generation, as her Mother often reminded her. But all through school, and all since she'd grown up, American-Americans were... weird.

  "...but I didn't mean to talk so long about that," her mother was finishing. "How are Nin and the others?"

  "Nin and Reese are fine," Michelle answered, immediately, like her own thoughts hadn't drifted. "Jon... committed a crime while in the Dungeon. So he's not with us any more. And Erik, since he was going along with us because of Jon, he decided to go find another team."

  "He committed a crime, you say?" Her mother's voice had a doubting edge, even though she had clearly caught on that it was serious. She had always given Jon more credit than he deserved, sometimes even more credit than her, or that's how it felt. "Is he okay?"

  Michelle grit her teeth, warring with how much she wanted to have this discussion, but knowing that her mother would want to know. "The crime... was against me, mama."

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  There was silence on the line. Michelle didn't exactly hurry along her next statement, but she didn't feel good about letting the silence stretch, either.

  "I told you that he was a possessive jackass. And he was. He tried to... look, I don't want to talk about it. Not yet. But what he did was awful, and public, and a crime, and I'm not sad he's gone. And we've been over for a long time anyway. Just please... don't ask?"

  "Are you okay?" Michelle wasn't sure what tone she expected her mother to have, but the hurt and care she heard there made her heart ache.

  "Yes, mama, I'm fine. I'm just... a little out of sorts." Michelle didn't want to continue the conversation, but couldn't just hang up. She settled for kicking off her shoes and pulling her legs up onto the couch with her, waiting for her mother to make any kind of follow-up question.

  "Did Nin and her boyfriend see what happened?"

  Michelle paused, but answered, "Yes."

  "Did they protect you." The question wasn't so much a question as a threat, which managed to still feel like it had teeth, for all that her mother wasn't a Dungeoneer, and Reese, when his barrier was up, might not even notice getting hit by a car.

  "...Yes, mama, they both stood up to Jon for me. So did Erik, even though he knew Jon better than he knew us. Everyone agreed that what he did was terrible and stupid. The Administrator, too." Michelle took a deep breath. "Nobody except Jon was against me. It was just him being a stupid asshole. But he's... he's gone now, and it's over."

  "Is it over?"

  Michelle hesitated. "Yes. The Administrator killed him for what he did. For good. It's over."

  She waited, again, not sure what kind of answer her mother would have to that, but the woman just sounded relieved. "Alright. If it's over, then there's nothing else to do about that now. When are you going to come over for dinner again? I'll make your favorite."

  Michelle almost laughed, instead shaking her head in the privacy of her apartment. "Maybe next week, mama. I'm tired right now."

  "If you're tired, I can take care of you here."

  "I know, mama, I know." She looked up, mentally cataloging the days, not for the first time since she'd woken up. Only Thursday. They'd been in the Run for less than two days, and she'd slept for most of another. "Next Friday?"

  "That sounds perfect." There was something to her mother's voice that made Michelle imagine she was conspiring against her somehow. Probably to find another boyfriend-candidate, already. "I'll have dinner ready when you arrive." There was a brief pause, as she tried to find another topic, and Michelle tried to think of a convenient excuse to escape. "You know your cousin Eri just got back from the Dungeon the other day as well. Your uncle Ken tells me that her group is getting to be well known in the Atlanta area..."

  Michelle pulled her legs in tighter against her body and listened as her mother rambled on about family matters for another twenty minutes. Until, finally, something else drew her mother's attention, and she finally hung up.

  That left Michelle alone in her apartment. She dropped her phone onto the couch beside her, reminding herself that was what she wanted. But as the silence bore down on her, it was a hard lie – or perhaps, a hard truth – to maintain.

  Her life wasn't supposed to work out this way.

  In so many ways, it would have all been better if Jon actually had been worth something. Maybe they could have gone from boyfriend and girlfriend to more. It was what her mother had wanted and expected. It was... kind of what she had grown up wanting, between her mother and public schools. A boyfriend, and a future where she would become a mother herself.

  A taste of independence had shattered that, or maybe just confused it, and then her father died, and she saw her mother suddenly not knowing what to do with herself. She'd thought that her mother's life had gone all according to plan, until she could compare her own life without shackles... to her mother suddenly losing hers.

  It wasn't all that dramatic. Her mother had moved on, and she was happy enough now, living on dad's savings, investments, and life insurance, and part time jobs to keep things steady. But she had done nothing with her life since then, and that path had seemed set in stone to her. Michelle, as she had considered college and other futures, saw a world full of options, and her mother... saw a world without possibility. She'd asked, sometime later, and her mom said that nobody wanted to hire some tired out housewife anyway, not for anything serious. That had framed her thoughts about getting married early, very differently.

  Now, Michelle was alone in a world where people died... or just disappeared, all too often. She had just over two hundred and fifty levels, and from what she had seen and what Jerry had told her, she was on her way to becoming a different kind of Dungeoneer. Maybe a better kind, though it hardly felt like it. More... different, in the sense that others wouldn't understand.

  Either way, that left her alone in her apartment, the walls bare and cold, half wishing that her mother were still prattling on about a bunch of random nonsense that she didn't even want to hear, just so that the silence would be less stifling.

  "Jerry..." She didn't know why she said it, except that some empty part of herself didn't care about the consequences. "I don't suppose you can hear me here, can you?"

  Silence answered her. There was no sense that she associated with an Administrator or spirit, no noise or notification from her messenger. She knew... or she had heard, that if she had spoken to one of the Dungeon Gods instead, they might have heard. Answering people's prayers was always more their kind of thing. But she wasn't sure she wanted someone she knew to hear her whimpering in the dark, much less someone she didn't.

  It's not like the walls of the room closed in on her. It's not like the world shrank. She'd had days like that; tonight wasn't one of them. But it was bad enough that the emptiness seemed unending, solid, like it was a tangible thing. Perhaps later, one of her neighbors would get home, and there would be at least some background beyond the road noise from outside, as upsetting as it would be. Right now, she didn't like being left alone with her thoughts.

  Partially in rebellion against her own mind, Michelle turned to her Inventory. The only thing she'd gotten from the Fool's Run – was their match considered a win or loss? Or neither? The ante hadn't been returned – was her Deck. The Inventory registered it as a [Storage / Equipment] item, and when she pulled it out, it appeared as a bracelet, its surface patterned like fine, twisting metal threads in an endless set of close-knit loops. As most Dungeon equipment did, it slipped into place easily and held position on her left wrist without any trouble or apparent effort. It even, with a slight mental twist, was willing to display the time like a watch, in small subtle numerals on a flat spot that she only noticed when she looked for it. No matter how she turned her wrist, she could always get the display to face her with the slightest effort a moment later.

  And all of that just to disguise its purpose.

  She could feel it like a second Inventory, which was better than most storage items, more like Neotech than traditional Dungeon items, though without the flair. There wasn't much in it, and all of it stored in cards – her Avatar, and all the default junk that had been generated last round; her minions, mobs, headquarters, tower... all of it. She frowned, and with a mental jerk, her Headquarters card appeared in hand.

  At a glance, it wasn't a well-designed card; the card title just said "Default Headquarters Template," in large block print. But, there was a little 3D holographic view of the building on the front, set against a white background within a thin black frame, and the slightest touch to the surface of the card within that frame rotated the view. With a minimum of effort, she discovered that she could slide the camera around with phone-inspired touch gestures, despite the card being paper thin.

  She tried to flick or pull the building out of the card, but when the card eventually acknowledged her efforts, it was with an interface overlay.

  A quick run through both her Inventory and her deck confirmed that she had no items that sounded like they fit that niche, and obviously she had no class features to achieve the same, or else shit would have happened, and it didn't. She touched the card back to her bracelet, and the deck absorbed it with a tiny flicker that made it difficult to focus on the moment it happened.

  After considering the rest of her deck, she pulled out her Avatar. Its card was a little fancier, with curlicues around the edges, and she could vaguely tell that there was some kind of second, transparent card layered on top; when she looked, it was clear that the top layer contained her level and stat block, as well as the sword and skill blocks in the bottom corners of the avatar display. There was also a second set of boxes below the display with other equipment and skill blocks, also on the upper layer.

  It didn't take any detective work to tell that the layer represented her last round. No matter how she turned the card around in her hand, she couldn't find any information she didn't already know. She'd heard that some facility in the Alpha dungeon would let her review the Run, from her own perspective at least, but if there were items to do other things with her cards, that was probably also something that needed its own support.

  A quick glance at each of her other cards suggested none of them were interesting, not without some way to interact with them. She put the last of them back in her deck, and after a moment of indecision, banished the Deck back into her Inventory as well. That left her sitting there, uncertain, in the emptiness.

  Less because she wanted to, and more just to have a task, she considered jumping right back into her car and headed back to the Alpha Dungeon. She couldn't Run alone – wouldn't try even if she could – but there were practice areas. And who knows, maybe she could talk to someone, maybe Jerry. Or at least have an NPC there, no matter how far from 'real' they felt.

  Instead, she got up, and started on lunch, not so much because she was hungry. She still needed rest, as the headache warned her, but she wasn't eager to just sit around and do nothing. Later, she decided, she'd text Nin. The girl might or might not be with Reese now, but she knew Nin well enough not to worry about that. If she was interrupting something, Nin would just get back to her later.

  For now, lunch. After that... she didn't know. But something.