Chương 118: CDM 2, Chapter 54: PR

How long did it take me to get perfectly used to not going to work? I was a pro from the very first morning. Megan made sure I thought about work, though. She texted me to say I should check my CDM email. It was an agency-wide announcement, as in every CDM office in the nation, not just Pittsburgh. Today, the courts ruled in favor of the Center for Dungeon Management. The RAID program has already been instrumental in improving harvester and community safety, and our interpretation of privacy laws was upheld.

We are still in the pilot phase for RAID, but a recent series of arrests have exposed a widespread black market for underground dungeon materials. This case alone justifies the blood, sweat, and budget that went into the creation of RAID, and we anticipate rolling out RAID nationwide in the coming months. This ruling does not change or nullify any confidentiality orders. We still urge you to be vigilant about what you share. Nathan and Cortez called it. RAID wasn't ever in danger of going anywhere.

The shoutout wasn't direct, but I imagined Enforcer Chapman was pleased with the mention. Her team found the illegal dungeon materials after all. Since I can be completely honest about everything at this point, I had hoped RAID would get cancelled. I didn't enjoy the work, and I didn't like the nonstop surveillance. At any rate, now that the courts made their ruling and a nationwide rollout was in the works, I could get stuck on the RAID team permanently.

Enforcer Grensmith warned me once that CDM career paths tended to lock you in, and RAID was not where I wanted to spend the next however many years of my professional life. Harvest site inspections I could tolerate. Staring at feeds I could not. My long shifts during the S gate made that perfectly clear to me. Then again, the Dungeon Divas continued to trend upward. I might not be long for the CDM if advertising revenue and sponsorship dollars continued coming in.

Rotting away behind RAID monitors would only make that an easier decision. I checked the Dungeon Divas inbox, pruning the unproductive correspondence as I went to spare Beth and Megan the experience. Tim sent an update to say the trail cam had caught only deer, and no harm had come to his livestock since our visit. The attacks were usually a few weeks apart, so this lack of activity was expected, but it would have been much more convenient if this dog monster were more active. Convenient for our YouTube channel.

Not convenient for Tim's cows. The troll hunting plan was complete, but we needed another two days for all of our supplies to come in. If anything arrived late, Megan wouldn't have a daylight shift free for another five days. We could go after the troll at night, but that seemed like a silly risk to take. The biggest argument for taking that risk, however, was the safety of the people living directly on top of the hunting troll.

The longer we waited to kill it, the more likely it was that another person or pet would become troll food. Having checked my email, I was officially done with work for the day. I turned on a stream and sat my ass on the couch. It felt so good to do absolutely nothing. By midday, the CDM court case spawned a litany of coverage.

The discovery of gallons of blight slime and factoids from the black market harvesting operation were mentioned frequently with headlines about public safety and the extreme dangers of unregulated gate harvests. The reporting itself was factual, but the presentation could be argued as fearmongering, or maybe I wasn't the best judge of that anymore. Monsters had become my life. I was used to these things, a typical civilian much less so. I tried to avoid any stories about the S gate tragedy, but that was difficult.

Discussions about researcher and harvester safety were fine, as were analyses of the gate's oddities and design, and I could tolerate fanboying over Lou Jackson. Too often, however, that worship spilled over to Martin Kielar and George Baker. I stumbled into whole Reddit threads of people sharing stories about how they met Kielar or Baker on the street or at a convention. They gushed about how nice and friendly they were and posted the selfie pics for proof. They were so down to Earth.

It was obvious that they loved their fans. Baker was funny and easygoing, like someone you wanted to hang out with. Kielar was even bigger than he looked but was really just a huge teddy bear. They treated staff and workers with kindness. And there was this viral post about giant tips they left at restaurants. Oh look, here were pictures of them posing with bald children in hospital beds.

Interactions that lasted less than a minute were enough for people to champion these celebrities as great people with excellent character. That handshake and that selfie photo were proof that Kielar was "a good guy" or that Baker was so generous to "always have time for his fans." Watching that adoration swell across the internet was a strange kind of helplessness. As one of the few who had seen behind the masks, I increasingly felt like I lived in a reality apart from everyone else.

That was the same feeling I had walking around my church community at 16. I was a lone dissenter amongst enthusiastic believers. Daily experiences made that obvious, and after a time, I started to question my interpretation of reality, the volume of people telling me I was wrong making me wonder if maybe they were right. Maybe something was broken in my mind, and I was the unreasonable person, not everyone else. Holy shit, sitting still this long was not good for me.

I browsed the EPA's GIS platform, entertaining the idea of a solo goblin-hunting expedition. Even if I was level 11, a goblin hunt could go wrong. My memory of being chased down railroad tracks by a goblin champion was still relatively fresh, after all. Upstate New York had a yeti SOC, and West Virginia had two bugbear SOCs. In terms of bugbears, I couldn't recall seeing them attached to any SOCs I had seen to date before that one. Tennessee had a worg SOC, which was also new.

If they were seeing worgs, maybe worgs eating Tim's cows wasn't as far-fetched of a theory as I thought it. I watched LootLootLouis vods. I listened to Valcuree's podcast. I read a dozen theories about the cause of Stage 2. My favorite was an advanced alien race using Earth as a form of entertainment. They sent us the system and dungeon gates just to watch what happened. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

The most plausible explanation, meanwhile, was that we simply didn't have enough data to know if this was truly an escalation. It could be that these spikes in difficulty were normal, but we didn't have records of them because they appeared in the wilds. How many gates had come and gone in Asia and Australia, for example? The same was true for South America. For 60 years or so after the gates appeared, no one checked the individual conditions inside of gates if they were in the wilds.

Our satellites logged the mana signatures, alerted us if they were an S, and then we mostly let the monsters have the run of the place.

"hey dude. wanna do happy hour with me and Megan?"

"God yes." I met Nathan, Megan, and Enforcer de Saint at Milly's. Now that Beth wasn't working there anymore, we didn't have that much of a reason for it to be our spot, but change was hard. Eventually, we would move into the guildhouse and have to find another haunt, but that wasn't tonight.

"How's leave?" de Saint asked.

"I'm so bored."

"What about hobbies?" I laughed.

"Books? Video games?"

"I watch television in between work, and sometimes I sleep." Nathan set his beer down.

"You could pick up the bestiary project if you didn't mind starting it alone."

"Bestiary project?" de Saint asked.

"Monster research sucks," Nathan said.

"If you want dungeon strategies or deep dives into anatomy, there's lots of that. But wild monsters? Nada. How quickly do goblin nests grow? When do trolls hunt together? How often do they hunt?" De Saint looked at Nathan quizzically.

"You're really into monsters." Nathan shrugged.

"We bullshit about all sorts of things. We also have a plan for what should be done with all those dead shopping malls and for how a professional basketball team could find a home in Pittsburgh. Anyway, the bestiary was Dorion's idea." I laughed.

"The bestiary is Nathan's idea entirely. All I've done is complain about what I can't find."

"What is the actual idea?" de Saint asked.

"Well, I met this marketing expert on a trip," Nathan explained, and I knew he meant Chrissy from Nad-Nade.

"She uses these 'listening' tools that scrape social posts from all over the web. For her, she's looking for people talking about her products. I was thinking we could do something like that but for monsters. Dump anything and everything anyone has ever said into one place and start cleaning it up." De Saint thought.

"That wouldn't be that hard to do."

"What do you mean?"

"Building something like that. The tools aren't complicated, and you could put a crowdsourced model on top of that. Let other people contribute."

"Not complicated?" Nathan exclaimed.

"I looked for those tools. It's definitely complicated."

"For you, maybe," de Saint teased. Megan grinned.

"She's a genius."

"Am not." Megan ignored her.

"She definitely is." De Saint interjected, "I could help. I owe Dorion anyway." I leaned forward.

"Wait. How does owing me become a favor for Nathan?" Nathan put a hand in my face.

"Bro, shh. Not now." To de Saint, he said, "If you're serious, yes. I will take that help."

"It sounds like a good project," she replied.

"A resource like that should exist. Building it would be fun."

"Promise to tell me when I start to be annoying," Nathan said, extending his hand. De Saint shook it.

"Promise." Nathan turned to me.

"If this works, this will be really good for us. I'm stoked, dude."

"What does that mean?" de Saint asked curiously.

"What do you two get out of this?" Stumbling, Nathan explained, "We've been interested in wild monsters a lot recently. More facts makes it easier to argue."

"Megan said you leveled on your trip to Taiwan. That must have been a lot of wild monsters." He wobbled his head.

"Dorion and Megan saw more of that than I did. The boosters clean up most everything so clients don't get eaten."

"What did you two see?"

"A wraith the first trip," I answered. De Saint stiffened.

"Really?" I nodded.

"Was that scary?"

"We were already on the boat speeding away from it, and yes. It was scary."

"The raiders were scarier," Megan added.

"You never said anything about raiders," de Saint recalled.

"We were strongly encouraged not to talk about it. They waited for us at the exit of a dungeon. They had some decent gear too, apparently from killing crawlers."

"Did you fight them?" Megan shook her head.

"The boosters ran us to the exit, and then they waited on the other side to attack anyone who might try to run. None of them did, and the gate closed."

"Wow."

"I've been thinking about that, actually…" I began, still unsure if I should share this thought.

"The defenders could drop barriers."

"So the raiders couldn't leave," Megan added, her eyes drifting downward.

"Yep."

"I read they found a ghost salamander not far from here," de Saint said, very obviously trying to change the subject for Megan's sake.

"That's almost as scary as a wraith."

"I did hear about that," Megan answered.

"I wish I could have seen it alive. We see so many monsters on inspections, but they're always dead already. It's not the same." Megan shook her head.

"No, it's not."

"I was glued to my phone for the whole frost giant crisis. I couldn't look away. It was too interesting."

"Where do you fall on the Stage 2 talk at this point?" I asked.

"Anything new sway you?" She shrugged.

"The data isn't complicated. Gates are getting more difficult. The only reason there's any debate about it is because a lot of people don't want it to be true, so in their minds, it just isn't. I know it makes me hesitant to answer when the CDM calls."

"Rethinking the enchanter path?"

"I still like the idea but not enough to die for it. Until the ranking process is reliable again, I'm passing on culls, I think."

"That's fair," I conceded.

"Wait. Are you still taking culls?"

"Yeah."

"That's nuts, Gray. You almost died."

"He also got a shit ton of XP," Megan said.

"XP isn't why."

"Then why?" I shrugged.

"I'm too curious. I want to know what's on the other side of a gate. Doesn't matter what kind of gate it is. If I'm given the chance, I'm going to go see."

"Even if it kills you?"

"I'd prefer it didn't, but yeah."