Chương 117: CDM 2, Chapter 53: Feasibility Study

If the CDM was going to keep me on the bench for a while, then I could devote more time to Dungeon Divas content, so I dove into the Dungeon Diva's inbox to see if we received any tips on the Hill District troll. And I immediately regretted it. The things strangers wrote about what they wanted to do to me, and the pictures they attached to show what they would do it with, were mind-boggling. How could so many people have the idea to send these kinds of messages and follow through with them?

Women in my life had long told me that this was the norm, and I believed them, but I didn't really understand how bad it was. This inbox was a flood of poorly lit, unflatteringly angled penises. Hundreds of them. As for tips on the troll, bullshit messages were almost as plentiful as dick pics. In a way, though, I was thankful when I could tell from a glance that a tip wasn't serious.

Any of the notes that sounded legitimate could be fake, and that pile was impractically large already, so obvious eliminations were a blessing in their own graphically phallic way. Thankfully, we received another doorbell camera video. Unlike the first, the creature in this one was undoubtedly a troll. My skin crawled the moment I opened the file, and to my eye, there weren't any signs of editing or manipulation. Nathan would be a better judge of that, but I was pretty sure I was right.

The RAID troll sighting was in a small green space in the southeast of the Hill District. The first doorbell cam was within a block of that location. This new video wasn't on the exact opposite side of that area, but it was close enough. Though a few streets cut through, there weren't many homes on them. That helped to explain how so few cameras had recorded its movements.

Between that swath of nature and the potential existence of hidden tunnels, the presence of a troll in the middle of the city seemed more plausible. This information narrowed the search area considerably, but that area still wasn't small. At the same time, I had nothing to do, so I grabbed my coat and crossed the river on foot to wander the Hill District. I wasn't sure what parts, if any, of the green space were actually public property, but I intended to explore them anyway.

A half inch of snow fell the night before, and I couldn't waste that opportunity to find easy tracks. My search began at the edge of the green space closest to the first troll video. My plan was to walk the perimeter. If the troll was using this area to move around undetected, he had to come and go. Was that the best way to begin a search like this? I had no idea, but it made sense in my mind. That plan fell apart as soon as I reached the search area. I hadn't given enough thought to where I was searching.

This was the Hill District, so uhh, it had a lot of hills. Those green spaces on the map were steep, fenced-off, overgrown hillsides in person, not something that was at all walkable. This was already a bust, but I had hiked all the way over here, so I might as well look around, I decided. Where I could, I checked the wooded edges for signs of trolls. As I went, I also counted the number of abandoned houses that butted up against those undeveloped slopes. Man. I really thought I was onto something.

Tracks could still certainly be in that mess. I just wouldn't be able to find them. I roamed the streets for 2 hours without a magical spark of inspiration. On my way back home, I thought about how much I would love a burrito right then. It was getting to be late afternoon. Maybe I should place an order with Nathan's usual and take the grub back to the apartment. I also thought about how strange cities were.

We, as a species, collectively decided that we should mass in these numbers, living right next to, on top of, and below countless other people. It was safer that way, even in the modern era. It was odd that so many houses were vacant and unlivable, yet my rent felt like paying a blood debt. Pigeons were also really freaking weird. How could such a dorky-looking bird adapt to survive in all this? How did they not freeze in the winter?

And venting sewer grates, that white smoke coming up out of the street and sidewalk–seeing those in old movies always freaked me out when I was a kid, like whatever steam escaped from beneath the city was somehow a sign of great evil. Steam was just heated water. With all of the infrastructure a city needed, water finding its way to a hot pipe wasn't strange. Oh. Ohhhh. I texted Nathan.

"How much of a heat difference does Kimmy need to pick something up?"

"the more contrast the better, but not all that much. why?"

"Say a troll lived in a tunnel connected to a basement. The body heat from the troll would have to exit the tunnel. Would that affect the house enough that Kimmy would see?"

"this time of year, maybe. are we taking kimmy around the hill district then?"

"Worth a shot, right?"

"yeah, dude. for sure."

Nathan and I parked roughly at the center of our search area. We waited until after midnight so that the ambient temperature was decently lower compared to during the day. If this were the summer, searching for troll nests via thermal imaging wouldn't be possible. Everything in the environment would be too hot.

"I don't know how you can do this and then work in the morning," I said as Nathan sent Kimmy into the air.

"You take dungeon runs in the middle of the night and go to work the next morning all the time."

"Not as often as I'd like."

"Dude, you know that wasn't my point."

"You're right. I'm sorry." I watched Nathan's laptop screen as he piloted our drone over the first house on our list. From there, we would go house by house looking for any signs that a warm-bodied creature was living in the basement.

"Did you find any tunnel maps online?" I asked.

"Nope. You?"

"Same. I called half the city earlier today asking if they had maps like that."

"Like who?"

"Sewer, water, power, Port Authority, permitting and zoning office, a few libraries." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Oh, you really did call half the city. No dice?"

"It's a public safety issue," I said.

"I read about something similar happening when people wanted to search Baltimore for surviving goblins. They don't want detailed plans of infrastructure ending up in the hands of terrorists. Even Freedom of Information claims don't count."

"FOIA is just bullshit, dude." FOIA stood for the Freedom of Information Act.

"What do you mean?"

"A guy I work with couldn't get any of the police reports that he himself filed. They've got notes posted all around cop stations about how FOIA doesn't apply to those anymore. Freedom of information my asshole."

"Police reports aren't FOIA anymore?"

"Not in Pennsylvania. Hey, isn't this house supposed to be abandoned?" I compared Kimmy's GPS position to my map.

"Yeah, it was on my list. That looks like more heat than a single troll, though." On the screen, most of the house was lit up. Nathan lowered Kimmy to a window to get a better look. Two people watched a phone screen together, and several more slept in various corners of the room. A kerosene heater was in the middle of the floor.

"Just some squatters," he said and took Kimmy back into the sky.

"And listen, if I'm not allowed to ask, tell me to suck it, but are you okay?"

"Have you been wanting to ask this whole time?"

"Ever since I heard you were discharged from the hospital, and then your dad showed up right after? Yeah, bro. I'm worried about you."

"Sorry. I've been in my head. This one isn't a secret."

"This one?" That was a careless slip of the tongue. Smooth, Dorion.

"I got locked into a D gate with B-ranked monsters. It was one of the dungeons Megan and I ran with Dawit. I assume Megan told you about it."

"She's hardcore about work confidentiality, so no. But fuck, man. Everyone get out?"

"Nope. The captain died. We had a few settlers with us, and one of them was critical last I heard." Nathan turned away from the screen completely.

"You saw someone die?"

"Yeah."

"Man, I'm sorry. You're allowed to be fucked up about that, you know."

"I do know," I replied.

"He was a good guy. We had done a few runs together. I'm sad about it, but I expected it to be more shocking. I sound like a psychopath saying that out loud."

"Nah, you don't at all. How many people have we seen die on stream? How many close, bloody calls have you had in dungeons? I mean, you got attacked by raiders for fuck's sake. You've been in the shit, dude. Promise you'll come to me if you ever think it might get bad."

"Promise." Nathan resumed flying Kimmy from house to house, looking for unusual heat signatures. I was grateful he didn't ask more about what my father wanted. He knew that story well enough already, and I was sick of telling it.

"Starting to sound like Stage 2 is a real thing," he mused after a while.

"Could be. If that's what it is, we won't be able to assess difficulty from the outside anymore."

"If a random D gate could actually be a B, you mean?"

"Yep."

"That's definitely a problem. I feel like we're going to hear about a lot of parties wiping in the near future then."

"What's that?" I pointed at a heat signature. Nathan squinted and zoomed with the camera.

"Cat." As he moved toward the next house, he said, "Ooo."

"That house is slightly warmer than the others."

"Yes, indeedy. Should I try to fly Kimmy in, or do you want to go in person?"

"I don't know how good trolls are with smells," I replied.

"Ah, right. Can't rub those Dorion pheromones all over. So let's see if I've gotten the hang of this…" Nathan brought Kimmy down and circled the house until he found an open window. He had to go in a second-floor bathroom and down two sets of stairs to reach the basement. Piloting a drone indoors like this was a challenge, but it was still easier than caves would be. For the most part, walls, floors, and ceilings were uniform. A random protrusion snagging a propeller was far less likely.

Still, Nathan's practice showed. Kimmy moved steadily and smoothly all the way into the basement.

"Would you look at that," Nathan said giddily.

"That looks like a tunnel." Under night vision, we could plainly see a brick arch built into the basement wall, partially obscured by a piece of plywood. When Nathan switched to thermal, we confirmed it was indeed warmer down the tunnel than it was outside.

"Want to fly in and check it out?" he asked.

"I don't think we should, or not on this visit at least. If we spook it, we might not find it again."

"Good call," he replied, reversing course to climb back up the stairs.

"Suppose we keep searching? We were already pretty sure he has a second exit."

"Yeah, let's keep looking." We resumed moving from house to house, working our way to where the second doorbell camera recorded the troll.

"Your list of cow buffet suspects is pretty serious," Nathan said, referencing our other active hunting project.

"You wouldn't fight something like a cerberus… right?"

"Not a cerberus, not a haunter, not a shadow mastiff, and I'd prefer if we didn't tangle with a frost wolf."

"Gnolls and werewolves are cool, though?" I shrugged.

"I've killed both."

"I was talking to Megan about how crazy some of the monsters on our list were, and she reminded me that she was in the same cave as a ghost salamander. I guess anything is possible."

"We live in interesting times."

"Cat," Nathan announced.

"Yes, that is a cat."

"Should we get a cat? I feel bad that Lil' Dorion is home alone all the time." I did my best to not take that bait.

"I've been thinking about troll tactics," I began.

"I don't want to fight it in the tunnels, but I think we have to."

"What do you mean?"

"Running through a city shooting arrows is probably frowned upon, and I think the troll would have even more of an advantage. It could ghost us so fast."

"You'll have Kimmy backing you up," Nathan pointed out.

"That's true."

"I see what you mean, though. It's no good if a troll hunt turns into an episode of COPS, so how would you do it?"

"Block off the exits and go in after it. I'm not sure the best way to do that, though. Trolls are strong, so you'd need something serious to trap it in, and anything serious I can think of would be ultra noisy to set up as well." Nathan stopped piloting for a second to think.

"They make these inflatable pipe plugs. Plumbers use them, and I've heard of some HVAC people using them too, but I've only ever seen wrench monkeys with them. Anyway, it inflates and makes a seal."

"Oh, that's an interesting idea."

"I'm not sure we could find one as big as one of these tunnels. That first one looked like it was 4 ft by 4 ft, which is pretty big. The concept would work, though."

"Lots of stuff self-inflates," I said.

"Those airplane escape slides. Rafts."

"You'd need something heavy-duty to survive troll claws and teeth."

"True."

"Dude!" Nathan pointed at his screen.

"How close are we to the second doorbell cam?"

"Three houses down."

"This could be it." He repeated the process of slipping Kimmy into the house and floating down to the basement.

"Fucking eh." There was another tunnel.

"I didn't think that would work," I admitted.

"You're better than you give yourself credit for, and that goes for pretty much everything in your life. What now?"

"I think we carve out a time to hunt. Go in during the day when a troll would probably be sleeping. Could be this is just a coincidence, though. I didn't see any obvious signs of troll activity. Might be the tunnels are empty, or some homeless people are camped out there."

"True. Kimmy would suss that out pretty quick."

"Yeah. She would go in first to see what's what." Nathan laughed.

"It wasn't long ago that finding a troll was your biggest fear. Now we're planning a home invasion."

"How quickly we've grown up."