Chương 145: CDM 3, Chapter 21: Volatile Market Conditions

The CDM announced that all gates should be treated as unknown dungeons with unknown difficulties. The government scrambled to produce active mana detectors and announced a plan to have a new satellite in orbit before the end of the month. The current satellites could only read inert mana, so until then, gates would be ranked according to the old system and spot-checked with manual active mana readings–if and when measurement devices were available in any specific region.

We still lacked the data necessary to glean anything actionable from an active mana reading, but the United Nations was in the process of fast-tracking a referendum that pooled every nation's gate data with the intention of establishing a new ranking system as quickly as possible. The same night I faced a shadow hunter, 7 other allied nations recorded Stage 2 anomalies, so world leaders were highly motivated to collaborate.

None of those gates had surged, but the unspoken sentiment seemed to be that it was only a matter of time until one did. How much damage could a single shadow hunter do before it was tracked down? For that matter, how did you go about tracking a monster like that in the first place? Internet pundits, however, were quick to point out that E and D gates surged in the wilds all the time. How many anomalies had gone undetected and spit out B-ranked monsters and up as a result?

Given the rates of reported anomalies–and there was some question as to how many such incidents individual governments opted not to disclose–at least 15 such gates would have appeared in the wilds of Asia, Australia, Northern Canada, and parts of South America. All of those gates would have been left to surge because only S-ranked gates got the emergency drop-in treatment.

"Dorion," Beth said. She shook her head with a polite smile when the waitress offered her a refill of tea.

"Yes?"

"Is it that you can't stop thinking about it or won't stop thinking about it?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"About monsters and gates." I had to consider the question for a moment.

"Third option: I don't know that I've tried stopping. What does that say about me?" Beth shrugged.

"Don't a lot of people think about work all the time? Especially after something hard?"

"Hard is an interesting word."

"Huh?"

"There's hard to do, and there's hard to experience. Does that difference make sense?"

"What made you think of that?"

"The dungeon was hard to do," I said.

"Being in handcuffs again was hard to experience. One of those makes sense to me."

"Crawling."

"Yeah. I've decided that's why I obsess over dungeons. I can do that kind of hard. I don't know how to square my connection to the system. I left the church because it didn't follow its own rules, and then went to work for the government, like it's any different."

"I understand why you think the pieces should actually connect, why you would want a clean, distinct sort of structure. I don't think that can really exist."

"But it does," I replied.

"It exists in dungeons. Inside of a gate, the objective is clear and so is who is friend or foe. If we don't kill them, they will kill us. There's no moral quandary. No shades of gray." I raised a finger to point at Beth. She was already fighting a grin.

"I heard it as soon as I said it, and I knew you'd give me shit for it."

"Okay, you're right," Beth relented.

"We're having a serious conversation, and I think I jumped on that because I'm also avoiding the hard to experience. I don't want to think about Jonathan or about mom and dad. It's so much easier when I don't."

"Anything you want to talk about?" She shook her head.

"Both topics are merry-go-rounds. No matter where I hop on or what horse I choose, it's the same loop. I know that, but I still get on."

"Because there's supposed to be closure."

"And there can never be closure. The ride is a circle, and it will always be a circle. The only real escape is never going near it again."

"Merry-go-rounds are consistently disappointing, aren't they?" I asked. Beth chuckled.

"Always. Any time I ever got on one for real, I ended up thinking, 'Why did I want to do this?'""Because when you see a merry-go-round, you go 'oo let's ride the merry-go-round.' I'm still guilty of it, I think. What a weird quirk in human nature."

"I remember always feeling lost when a merry-go-round stopped," Beth said.

"I needed a few moments to figure out where I left mom and to find the exit."

"This was pretty deep for a breakfast conversation." Beth shrugged.

"Thank you for getting up this early for me. I'm glad I got to see you before work."

"Me too."

"Can I say one more thing before you get the check?"

"Of course," I answered.

"Wait. I never volunteered to pay."

"No take-backs." I laughed.

"It's fine. What did you want to say?"

"I was pretty young when you started to have questions about church, but I remember how frustrated and hopeless it made you feel. You kind of disappeared into yourself long before you left because you had no one to talk to about all the stuff in your head. What I mean to say is I'm not a kid anymore. If something gets hard, you don't have to handle it on your own. Let me help." My mental image of who Beth was in my mind and how she saw the world had a six-year gap in it.

I got to read the first book, and then I picked the series back up again on book three, never having read the second. Those gaps in a story weren't impossible to navigate. You can infer past scenes from context clues, so even if you missed a few episodes, you could mostly understand where the plot was now. I needed to remember how many pages I was missing from Beth's story. If I didn't, I would see her as my eleven-year-old sister and not as the person she was working on becoming now.

"Thank you," I said.

"I do want your help. I'm not used to asking, so don't hold it against me if it takes me a moment to remember."

"Don't worry. I'll remind you." Nathan shook the rain off his jacket when he stepped into the High Bar Pub. Megan, myself, and de Saint were at our usual table. Beth was supposed to join us, but she got stuck working late at Frank's.

"Well?" de Saint asked as Nathan sat. Megan slid him a beer she had ordered for him before he arrived.

"That was the weirdest job interview ever," he said, hanging his coat on the back of his chair and sitting down. He took three big gulps of his beer before continuing.

"They kind of made it impossible for me to say no, which was the opposite of what I expected, not when you guys talked about having to flex and lobby for them to even consider me."

"What do you mean?" de Saint asked.

"Meg and Dor had to really go to bat for me. They did not want a civilian contractor for this." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. She shook her head.

"No, I meant how did they make it impossible to say no?"

"The biggest concern I had was juggling a day job that counts on me being available for work with being on-call for a different job. They have a position lined up for me with a union contractor. Same pay, still keep my union progress going, but they won't penalize me or complain if I'm abruptly unavailable."

"Really?" Megan asked.

"They had that ready?" Nathan nodded.

"Crazy, right?" That was a surprise for all of us.

"The HR person doing the interview spent maybe 10 minutes explaining how atypical that was and that she had never seen that before, and blah, blah, blah."

"And after that?" Megan asked.

"I have to do a background check and get my fingerprints taken. If I do that, the job is mine if I want it." De Saint leaned in.

"Are you taking it?"

"Diva work is maybe the most fun I've ever had on a job," Nathan admitted.

"The chance to do more of that with my favorite people? Hell yeah, I'm taking it. Shipping out next week for training is a bit nuts, but I can handle it after the Nad-Nade trip." Megan reached for Nathan's wrist.

"Did you say shipping out next week?"

"Yeah… We all are." Laughing, de Saint said, "I hadn't heard that yet." Megan and I shook our heads to confirm we hadn't heard that either.

"Well… Surprise!" Nathan added.

"Hard to believe we get to do this and Diva work at the same time."

"I think Dorion saving the day again in that D gate gave us a lot of pull," Megan suggested.

"I don't think that's true," I countered, but really, it probably was. De Saint stood.

"Yeah, we all know that's bullshit, Gray. I'm getting another round. Any order changes?"

"More beer is good," Nathan answered, and de Saint stepped away with a nod.

"So the group is missing two, right?" Nathan asked.

"Any idea who the other dudes or dudettes will be?" Neither Megan nor I had heard anything about that.

"I'm hoping at least one is a mage," Megan added.

"That's been our weakness from the start. Us and every other non-guild party on the planet."

"They'll be multiclass mages if anything," I said.

"Why do you say that?"

"The wild hunting program Grensmith was in back in the day codified that part. Recruiting pure mages was too expensive, so any mage in the program would be a multiclass. The same people aren't running this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they went that way again." Megan thought.

"We also don't know what levels they'll be. It would make sense for them to be 10 or 11 like we are, but maybe that's wrong to assume."

"Would be smart to do it that way," de Saint said, setting three beers on the table. She turned back around and returned a moment later with a fourth.

"If we're going to train together, starting on equal footing would make more sense to me."

"Did your HR contact tell you anything about where we are shipping off to?" I asked Nathan.

"Nah, bro. Not a word. Where are the biggest CDM offices? DC, New York, LA. Maybe one of those."

"DC would be fun," de Saint said.

"I've always wanted to visit." I wobbled my head.

"Uhh… I don't think any of those."

"Make your prediction, Master D," Nathan teased.

"Go on."

"I think they'll want to level us, and if that's the case, domestic training doesn't make sense. If we weren't just coming out of winter, I would guess Canada, but I'm going to say South America." I didn't just think that they would want us to level. I knew they did because Enforcer McDouglas had said so explicitly. He never told me where or how that would happen, though.

"We're going to have to find a sitter for Lil' Dorion," Nathan joked.

"I've never left him alone that long. Makes me worried." De Saint chuckled as she shook her head and took a drink of her beer.

"What's so funny, Rainy? You don't think Lil' Dorion has feelings?" She laughed a little bit more.

"I would never speak ill of Lil' Dorion. I'm not a monster. The other day, I realized I used to always feel like I didn't fit in, like I was the weirdo no matter what group I was around. I haven't felt that way for a long time, and I didn't notice it go away." Nathan shrugged.

"We're pretty great." Megan pushed his shoulder with faux scolding.

"We like having you in the group too, Rainy."

"Thank you," de Saint said.

"I've only gone on one hunt with you guys, but it was amazing, and everything that orbits it has been fun too. Oh!" De Saint jumped in her seat as if having taken a sudden shock. She spun to reach the purse hanging on her chair and turned back around with a tablet in her hands.

"So much has been happening, I almost forgot," de Saint began.

"First of all, traffic for Domestic Dungeons is climbing, but that's not what I wanted to show you. We've gotten quite a few tips from New Hampshire, maybe three times as much as any other state, so that caught my eye. Now, this is what it looks like if I map the tips." She tapped the screen and showed us an image with Mount Monadnock at the center. Pins representing the tips we received formed a rough circle around the mountain.

"Here is the same map with the last six months of EPA SOCs overlaid. Anything that isn't plain yellow means that location was an SOC more than once during that time. The closer it is to red, the more repeats it has had." These also formed a circle, and out of maybe 30 blotches representing SOCs, 10 or so were orange, and 2 were red.

"Interesting, right?"

"Not to be the downer, but is that shape really a surprise?" Nathan asked.

"Tips have to come from people, and most people don't live in the deep mountains, so that circle seems normal to me." De Saint grinned.

"I thought the same thing, but the timeline is weird. Watch." She stepped through the appearance of SOCs, and the pattern looked like a reverse pulse. When one set of SOCs was cleared, the next ring was closer to the mountain, and then the next ring was even closer. That repeated two and a half times in six months.

"Like they're gaining ground and getting pushed back," Megan observed.

"Yes!" de Saint exclaimed.

"If there was a big nest in the center, this looks a lot like an attempt to expand, or maybe these are goblins getting pushed out of the nest because they're out of room." She took the tablet back, tapped a few times, and put it back on the table.

"This is the state view for the same six months." When the timeline bumped forward, the reverse pulse was even more distinct because the rest of the data points in the state seemed random.

"Okay, that's pretty compelling," Nathan said.

"What are you proposing?"

"Nothing in particular. I just thought it was interesting."

"We wouldn't be able to bankroll our own mountain investigation," I began, "so that leaves pass it to the CDM or ask Nad-Nade for budget." Megan leaned back and crossed her arms.

"This is the kind of situation we said we'd pitch to them."

"How would we go about it if we got the money?" I asked.

"That's legit mountain terrain, and I don't know anything about mountaineering. That's a ton of space too."

"And they almost have to be in caves, which we aren't fans of," Megan added.

"How big of a nest does it have to be to create that many offshoots so consistently?" de Saint asked. None of us had the answer, and questions like that were a major motivation behind wanting to start the Domestic Dungeons project in the first place. Her raising it was more to point out that this hypothetical mothership nest had to be really damn big. If we had the data, we would be able to estimate just how big.

"I'm not joking when I say we would need money for air support," I said.

"We would need days of hiking. Then we'd need way more crawlers to have any hope of managing a nest like that. The EPA would put a couple hundred people on the ground for a hunt this big, if what we saw with the bugbears scales." Nathan shook his head.

"This is a cool find, but the more we talk about it, the more obvious it sounds this one is beyond us. My suggestion: Make Nad-Nade aware of it, so if they do want to write us a blank check, we can run with it. If they want to bring in a bunch of LootLootLouis-type crawlers, then we're golden. I agreed.

"I'm guessing they pass on the idea because of the cost, but we offered them a decent lead, and that will look even better when someone proves Rainy's theory. In the meantime, we do a post predicting there's a big-ass nest in Mount Monadnock. Get the street cred for calling it." De Saint nodded enthusiastically.

"Yes. Yes! That's a good plan. I would support that 100%." Megan and I nodded that we would support it too.

"I'll write up the pitch and the post tonight so everyone can review it before we send it to Beth," I offered.

"What a fucking day," Nathan said with a light laugh.

"Dor and I would bullshit about game planning dungeons just to pass the time. We were also probably drunk but still just passing the time. Now I'm on two different hunting teams? What the hell, man? This is nuts."

"Getting used to two codenames will be a pain," Megan pointed out.

"Why wouldn't I be Kimmy for both?" he asked.

"... because the government is more serious than Power Rangers jokes?"

"This wasn't part of the deal. I'm a method crawler. I can't be switching personas that frequently." De Saint coughed when she choked a little on her drink.

"Did you just say you're a 'method' crawler?"

"Yeah. I have to become Kimmy. It's a whole headspace."

"In character for a drone?" de Saint asked.

"I'll have you know that Kimmy is the heart and soul of this team. She's also the only one who wears Gate Girl Glitter products, so tread carefully. If Kimmy walks, we could lose a sponsor." De Saint physically turned her back to Nathan and addressed Megan.

"How do you keep up with whatever is happening in that mind?" Megan shrugged.

"Honestly, hanging out in his world isn't half bad. I just embrace it." Turning to eye Nathan, de Saint said, "That sounds like a big mental adjustment."

"It is an Alice in Wonderland sort of experience, but after you go down the rabbit hole once, it gets less trippy and easier to manage." Nathan looked distressed.

"What's wrong?" Megan asked. He sighed.

"I can't decide if that whole conversation was a compliment to my worldview or an insult."