Chương 104: CDM 2, Chapter 40: Brand Collaboration

For the first four hours of the S gate auction, the Dungeon Delvers Guild handily outbid all competitors, which included out-of-state organizations. Those bidders incurred additional taxes that in-state organizations didn't have to pay, so in most cases, bidding outside of your market was not profitable. An S gate was an exception. Several hours into our shift, I managed to get a 30 minute break out of the office where I could check my phone and stretch my legs with a walk to the tea shop.

Beth had sent me these texts:"Hey did you hear an S gate opened?"

"Having a busy day I guess?" Three hours later:"You good?"

"Why is your phone off? Are you okay?"

"Dorion" An hour after that:"You're a butthead. Megan had the forethought to tell her boyfriend that she wasn't going to be reachable for a while because of some work thing. I'm guessing you got called in too. Wtf Dor. I was so worried."

"I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

"I'm glad you're okay. And I understand. Sorry I freaked out."

"You're right that I could have given you the heads-up. I don't know when I'll be home, and yeah, we have to turn in our phones. I have to get back. Love you."

"Love you too." I smiled. On a whim, I refreshed the browser tab with the newest Dungeon Divas video open. Jesus Christ. We neared 7 million views. Nad-Nade had to give us an offer now, right? That was more views than a lot of their other sponsored crawlers got on their videos. Was there a metric more important than that? I didn't know. For that matter, I didn't know what a good offer was. Currently, my measuring stick was whether it was more than I made now, but what if the norm was higher than I thought?

Maybe Beth or Megan knew the answer to that. I thanked the woman for my drinks. I turned my phone off at the door and passed it to the guard working the scanner.

"Did I miss anything?" I asked, passing out tea to the other 3 enforcers in the RAID room. Cortez answered, "More kids with phones trying to get close for pictures and such. Nothing crazier than that." He frowned.

"I asked for a Grape Ball-Ballin' Nad-Nade."

"You've had four already."

"Hi mom, I didn't know you got a job here too."

"If I'm buying, I refuse to be an enabler," I replied.

"If your heart blew up, then I'd have to feel guilty the rest of my life. Major bummer." Cortez laughed.

"Thanks, brother." Also, I couldn't even handle the smell of an energy drink at this point. You could argue that this next move was the behavior of a suck-up: I put a tea on Enforcer Chapman's desk. I had worked around her long enough to know how she took it, and I knew she was a tea fiend. Anyone who called that sucking up would be right. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Chapman nodded her head at me but didn't say anything. Okay, maybe I shouldn't have expected results from the first tea.

If my math was correct, I probably needed north of 10, 000 cups of tea to turn the corner with Chapman. Grensmith called into the RAID room landline and asked for me.

"Having a good night, Enforcer Gray?"

"I've had quieter."

"You should pull up the drone feed for my current inspection." I filtered by Enforcer, selected Grensmith, and brought up the B gate where he was running an overnight audit.

"Southwest of center," Grensmith said.

"I'm on the passenger side of the water truck." I saw Grensmith in a puffy jacket with a purple scarf looking up to wave at the drone. He stood next to a water truck, yes, but next to him on his other side was a dragon toad, one of several monsters in a caravan of flatbeds that awaited departure. Its mouth was strapped shut.

"What do you suppose we'll find inside?" he asked.

"How long until that happens?"

"You're my first call. I thought you'd want to deliver the news up the chain. Don't worry, this thing isn't leaving my sight."

"Thank you." I hung up with Grensmith and went to Chapman's office.

"Enforcer Grensmith just called me," I said.

"We have a possible find." Her head popped up.

"For the black market case?"

"Yes. I just emailed you the gate details and coordinates. We have a drone on it now as well."

"Thank you, Enforcer Gray. I'll let Investigator Dempson know right away. Good work." I dared to think that was a positive development. When I returned to my desk, Cortez pointed at the auction page for the S gate. We had it up on a monitor, and all of us checked it obsessively.

"Do you know who the Steel Alliance is?" he asked.

"I don't, actually." No one else in the RAID room knew either. A team or guild that none of us had heard of was very strange. Even stranger was that they definitely sounded local. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"Team registration is brand new," Cortez reported.

"Paid the sign-up fees an hour ago."

"Weird," I said.

"Super weird."

"If only we had portable devices that could access the news instantly," Cortez drawled.

"Something like that would be so convenient." Cortez was having phone withdrawal. Bad.

"They would have to have crawler licenses already to register as a team, right?" he asked.

"Crawler licenses take days to process otherwise. Sounds like someone is making a move."

"We'll know eventually." Our emails dinged. Chapman had sent us personnel files for local Dungeon Delvers, prominent national Dungeon Delvers, the Furious Few, the Mill Rats, and the Iron Crawlers. The body of the email read,"It looks like we'll need these files when the bidding closes." Of those names, only the Dungeon Delvers had bid in the last five hours. The Steel Alliance had to be a joint effort between the other Pittsburgh crawling organizations.

Pooling their resources was likely their best chance at outspending the Dungeon Delvers. Over my shoulder, I heard Chapman say, "This wasn't mentioned in the procedure planning."

"An oversight, ma'am," a man in Army fatigues said. He and Chapman talked in the RAID doorway.

"I did not mean to surprise you, and I apologize that we didn't touch base with your office earlier."

"Thank you for saying so, but no, this won't be a problem," Chapman replied, leading him toward where we sat in front of the RAID monitors.

"Dr. Guld is from the Army. He is part of the security assigned to the NSF team." This was really interesting. I never got to see this part of the S-ranked gate experience on streams. NSF stood for National Science Foundation, a government organization primarily known for funding promising research around the country. The NSF, the Army, and the CDM had a joint research project dedicated to collecting as much insight from S-ranked gates as possible.

They went into the dungeon behind the crawlers, just barely ahead of the harvesters, and collected samples, made observations, took photos, captured video, and so on. This was a known program that you always heard about, but I was curious to see how they operated, and I wished I could see how they worked inside a gate. The time constraint they faced forced them to work far more quickly than any typical scientist.

Not only did they have to acquire hundreds of samples–water, soil, rock, plants, monsters, insects–but they also needed to be vigilant for something exceptional while not getting killed. Since S-ranked gates didn't repeat very often, discovering that the sand you collected was the secret to eternal life was less exciting if you only collected a scoop. In all likelihood, that beach would never appear again.

So, as samples were collected, a dedicated team conducted basic analyses, hoping they came upon something remarkable ahead of the gate closing. I would have loved to see their process for thoroughly but swiftly analyzing a mineral. That sounded like the microscope olympics to me. Fuck. I stopped paying attention to what they were saying.

"I'm looking forward to working with all of you," Dr. Guld said.

"I have no intention of interfering with your work here. I'm meant to be a second set of eyes and as a resource for any questions that might arise as our people collaborate." We nodded. No one but Chapman seemed bothered by his arrival, not that any of us had any choice in the matter. I suspected Chapman was more upset about being left out of the loop than she was about having to work with another government agency. My email dinged. Dempson found drake wings in the mouth of the dragon toad.

That win plus the tea I just gave Chapman had to put me back in her good graces. I was proud of myself, but don't take that to mean I believed that I did this. I connected the dots on something simple that non-dungeon smugglers did, and Grensmith did the rest, really. He noticed what was odd about the harvest practices I showed him, and he found one in the field. Being a part of that was pretty cool, though. As God loves to do, my celebration was cut short by unpleasant news.

The Steel Alliance won the auction, and Chapman sent us an email confirming my theory: The Furious Few, the Mill Rats, and the Iron Crawlers went in together on the S gate. Martin Kielar was guaranteed to be on the team, so I would have to see his face and hear his voice for the next 3 weeks, at least. Even worse, Beth would have the same experience but with more pain and more anger. I wished I could protect her from that somehow.

Being behind the scenes for an S-ranked gate was a novel experience, but it also meant we missed all of the coverage and commentary surrounding the crawl. I enjoyed that sort of content, but going back and watching the VOD instead of seeing it live wasn't the same. So, when 12 crawlers strode toward the open monkey mouth and up a ramp to its teeth, we didn't have the voice of an expert in our ears talking through details we might miss.

For any other S gate, I would want to know everything about every crawler on the run, but the first crawlers I recognized soured my interest in the rest. Martin Kielar was in the party, as I had feared, but I hadn't expected George Baker to be involved in this as well. Maybe this would be the dungeon that defeated them. Dying to a monster wouldn't be justice, but it would be something. As soon as the crawlers were inside, the NSF team moved into position.

As a steady snowfall began, six ATVs with trailers, their cargo packed into heavy-duty travel cases, formed an orderly line. 10 army crawlers were equipped to guard the 30 researchers. Everyone stood in full PPE as if the inside of the gate was a hazardous environment. They wouldn't know if that was the case until the primary crawlers reported back, but it was easier to strip down PPE than it was to put it on, so being prepared for the worst was standard procedure.

Twenty minutes after the primary party had entered, a younger man that RAID said was a defender for the Iron Crawlers stepped out of the gate and handed a device to the nearest soldier.

"He'll do an arm pump if the atmosphere readings are normal," Dr. Guld said. Sure enough, the soldier turned to face the research party and pumped his arm. The convoy began entering the gate.

"Someday, we'll have drones that can go in and out of gates with no issue," he added.

"Helmet feeds are better than nothing." That footage was on four monitors at Guld's makeshift workstation. We weren't told it was illegal for us to watch, but Guld still discouraged it.

"Alright everyone," Chapman said, speaking loudly for the whole room to hear.

"We are still not disclosing details about our work or the gate publicly, but the embargo on your devices is over. Please take turns going to the front to retrieve yours." When I turned on my phone, a video from the Furious Few channel was trending. There, in the lobby of the CDM, I turned it on.

"This is quite the Christmas present for the home team," George Baker said in a selfie video, his curly mustache stiff as a board as he spoke.

"The Furious Few, the Mill Rats, and the Iron Crawlers have joined forces to clear the new S-ranked gate. We are honored to represent Pittsburgh, and we are grateful to our guilds, teams, friends, and loved ones for all the support you've given us over the years. I am prerecording this announcement because when we win the bidding. We're heading in right away. You guys got anything?" He turned away from the camera as he asked. In my mind, I realized how close Christmas was.

I thought it was weeks, but really it was days. These crawlers were likely to spend the holiday inside of the gate. The camera turned to Martin Kielar. His red beard was immaculately cut, almost as though he got it done for this occasion specifically.

"George said most of what I had to say, but I want to add that you're invited to come with us," Kielar began.

"We'll be livestreaming this crawl from start to finish, and that means we'll read your messages too when we can. I know I'm going to need some support, so don't be afraid to comment or write. With all the challenges crawlers have faced over the last 12 months, we all needed this, and that means we still need you. Thanks for coming along for the ride." Lou Jackson, a druid and founding member of the Iron Crawlers, appeared in the frame. His long hair and beard were white, but his skin still looked tan and youthful.

He had a hard browline and brilliantly white veneers. Jackson might be the oldest active crawler in Pittsburgh, and he still tried to crawl every day. Hence why he was a mind-boggling level 27.

"Is this pointing the right way?" Jackson asked someone off camera. A muffled voice said, "Face the screen toward you." Jackson's face settled in the middle of the frame.

"I've always said Pittsburgh has some of the best crawlers in the world, but we don't come from big guilds in big cities, so our guys don't get the credit they deserve. That's about to change, friends. See you on the other side." And the footage cut off.